Freshman brothers create iPod game

For the past semester Cory and Toby Flint have been programming a new game for the iPod Touch from their dorm on the bottom level of Simpson Hall, and they're almost ready to release it.
The game, entitled "Satellite Defense," is modeled after the tower defense genre, where the goal for the player is to place stationary weapons across a field in order to prevent an enemy from crossing the screen. Cory Flint said the game has 12 unlockable maps with progressive difficulty and will cost 99 cents.
Sophomore Brett Ramsay played the game in its early stages and said he was impressed the brothers were able to do while in school.
Freshman Brad Francis agreed.
"That's what blows me away," Francis said, "how much time and effort they put into it." The Flint brothers' latest project has drawn on all of their skills which Cory Flint considers to go hand in hand with a liberal arts education. Between the two, the brothers have taught themselves advanced programming methods, composed their own music and have developed their own art all within one semester.
In preparation for the game's release, the brothers just launched www.brothersflint.com. Another project they've undertaken for their game.
The brothers said they can't remember when they first decided to make a game for their new iPod Touch, but they decided to give it a go simply because they could, and it was there.
"I think it began as a form of relaxation," Cory said.
Toby agreed, saying they started to work on it to unwind from the day.
Cory said large-scale projects aren't uncommon for the two. He said they started with lemonade stands when they were kids. Their Eagle Scout projects, an amphitheater and campfire, melded into one with their addition of trails. The brothers also documented their backpacking adventures in New Mexico their book, "The Philmont Chronicles." Hillsdale's library has a copy. "It was a joint project," Cory said.
"That's just how we roll," Toby said.
Cory was responsible for crafting the game's three-dimensional models and art. Toby was responsible for the programming.
"If you see it, he did it, if they move, my program did it," Toby said.
Toby said he began programming his own games on his Nintendo DS when the brothers were in high school in Omaha, Neb. His first game was pong. On his DS, the game looked rudimentary at best. Red, yellow, blue and green colored lines formed the boundaries and the black background had the white words "back-" and under it "ground" scribbled onto the screen.
Toby said he decided to continue to write programs when he and Cory purchased a Macbook Pro that came with a free iPod Touch and printer. He said he learned how to program on a MacIntosh computer by using various tutorials and Apple documents on the Internet. When the brothers began to take the project seriously, he decided to quickly learn code by looking at tutorials he came across and applying them immediately.
"We came in second semester with no specific experience," Cory said. "It was like going from zero to 60 in a few seconds," Toby said.
Toby said to imagine the program files as a type of hierarchy where one file calls on another set and that set of files call on another. He said all the files constantly message between one another to create an object onscreen, like an enemy capital ship.
If (currentCapitalShip==1) { fl: PushMatrix();
What follows are seven out of 3,102 lines of code. Each line contains black and brown acronyms, purple and green letters and the ever-present blue numbers. They tell where the enemy capital ship will be placed, how big it'll be and how it's oriented. At first glance, nothing seems to have any order, but after a few moments of adjustment, patterns and symbols begin to emerge and a language is formed. Brackets are paragraphs markers and semicolons are periods.
"There's a reason why they call programming languages 'languages,'" Toby said.
Junior Elliot Gaiser tested the game as well, and said he was impressed with the brothers' talents.
"They go all out on everything," Elliot said.
That may be true: both of the brothers composed the music for the game in a single weekend, but there's a problem. Cory said the sound effects were a bit loud, Toby agreed, and the decision to fix it was finial.