43
Canfield native invents Planet Pop game app
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
CANFIELD
A Canfield man has invented Planet Pop, a free game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that features cute characters, simple but challenging gameplay, and leaderboards for competition.
Steven Dalvin, a 2010 Canfield High graduate, wanted to create a game that was fun, charming and addicting. To meet that goal, he set Planet Pop on a dangerous planet inhabited by bubble aliens, and allows player to make use of extra fuel tanks, shields and magnets.
Dalvin now lives in Boston, where he attends Harvard Medical School.
Back in 2008, independent developers like Dalvin were commonplace in Apple’s mobile App Store, which provided a way for such people to make their creations available to the world.
However, as the mobile market continued to develop, expectations for quality mobile games rose dramatically.
Rather than mostly solo developers releasing homemade projects, there are now teams of developers spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on artists, marketing specialists and coders to create more extravagant applications. For example, Angry Birds, one of the most-successful mobile applications to date, had a team of 12 people and cost more than $130,000 to make.
Dalvin did not have any of those resources at his disposal. Armed with only his laptop and a semester off from school, he set out to create a game reminiscent of the early days of the App Store.
There was just one problem – Dalvin did not know how to make iPhone applications. Nor was he an artist. In fact, he knew nothing about the gaming industry in general.
So Dalvin started scouring the Internet for tutorials and any other help he could find.
“It was really confusing at first,” he said. “Sometimes you’d be missing something as simple as a semicolon in your code and spend hours trying to figure out what was wrong. But after finding a few easy tutorials, I got some basic stuff working.”
His game was just a circle floating up and down at first, but that evolved into a circle collecting squares, and then a circle collecting squares while avoiding spikes.
“I was really excited when I first got things working, but that excitement only lasts for so long,” he said. “When it wears off I found the game was lacking, and that’s when I started learning to draw.”
In its current form, the game features several alien bubble characters, each with its own quirky personalities, beautiful landscapes that change as the player progresses, and an array of houses appearing on the title screen that grow into mansions as scores rise.
“One of my favorite things about coding is that it’s 100 percent free,” said Dalvin. “It allows you to make a useful product with nothing but your time, and that’s really powerful.”
When asked what inspired him to create the game, he replied, “I really like inventing, so learning iPhone development was another valuable skill I could add to my arsenal. I’m also going to med school, so if I think up a great idea to help patients, whether that’s through education or diagnostics, knowing iPhone programming will be really helpful.”
In fact, Dalvin will be joining VACUscan, a startup in Boston, thanks to his newly acquired skills. At VACUscan, he will help build a mobile app for measuring the healing potential of diabetic foot ulcers.