Little Acorns was my first proper indie game project since 1996 (Blobz on the Amiga!)
It was developed between July and November 2011, by ‘Team Pesky’ – which was primarily two of us – I was doing all the programming, some of the level design and additional art. Most of the art, the music, and the original concept were by Andy Gibson. Later in the project, Richard McClaughry joined the team as a level designer, building many of the game’s 60 levels.
The game was developed using C++ and OpenGL ES, via the Marmalade SDK (used simply as a platform abstraction layer, allowing me to focus on C++/GLES and not have to deal with the details of iOS, or Objective C). Marmalade was very effective – allowing me to work in the familiar environment of Visual Studio on a PC, whilst targetting both iOS and Android.
It ran at a lovely smooth 60fps on iPhone 3GS and above, which was a more challenging thing to achieve than it is these days, with vastly more powerful devices.
The game was published by Chillingo, and released in Feb 2012. A Windows Phone 7 version followed. Unfortunately it’s no longer available on iOS, and a 64bit update isn’t easy as the Marmalade SDK no longer exists.
However, we later released an updated version of the game, ‘Super Little Acorns 3D Turbo’, on the Nintendo 3DS, published by Pixel Toys, and this became the definitive version of the game, with additional ‘challenge mode’ levels, a speeded-up turbo mode (faster and less floaty than the original), and of course, better controls than a touchscreen could offer.
Screenshots (from iOS version)
Here’s a nice review of the 3DS version: