Buster Bash

Problem

In 2012 an athlete's mobile presence was usually somebody else's game with their face applied to it. Buster Posey had just won the National League MVP, and the brief was a game that was actually his — reported at the time as the first official mobile game endorsed by a Major League Baseball player, which meant there was no template to copy.

An endorsed game carries a constraint an ordinary one does not. It has to be genuinely good, or it embarrasses the person whose name is on it. And it has to be recognisably about that person, rather than a generic batting game wearing a licence.

Approach

The design answer to "make it his" was to use his actual career as the progression: the player starts as a kid in Leesburg, Georgia and works up to the major leagues. That turns biography into structure — the arc a fan already knows becomes the thing they play through, so the endorsement lives in the mechanics instead of sitting on top as artwork.

Underneath, the game is a native iOS build on cocos2d for rendering and scene handling with Box2D for physics, both adapted rather than used as shipped. A baseball swing is an unforgiving thing to simulate: the window in which bat meets ball is a few milliseconds of real time, and the difference between a game that feels like hitting and one that feels like tapping a screen lives entirely in how that contact is modelled and fed back. Most of the engine work went there.

Behind the app, a backend on Amazon EC2 with PostgreSQL.

Attribution

This work was delivered at Ground Up Logic, a previous company, and is credited to that studio. Jeff Weinberger is named in the credits on the Webby Awards entry. It appears here as his work, not as Realm 8's.

Outcome

The game reached over 200,000 users, and was recognised by Apple and by national media — USA Today, CBS, NBC Bay Area and Fast Company — as the first game by a Major League Baseball player.

It was named an Official Honoree in the 2013 Webby Awards, in Games (Handheld Devices).