Why Our First iPhone Game Starts at 5
Roadie Wars 5 : Stage Climb is the first Roadie Wars game you can actually buy. That's not a mistake — it's the joke, and it's also a design story.
There is no Roadie Wars 1 through 4. Well — sort of. Roadie Wars 5 started life as a browser beat-'em-up I built for fun, and when it came time to put a version on the iPhone we kept the number. Partly because the title-screen logo was already perfect, and partly because starting at 5 means the prequels are sitting right there waiting to be made. Nobody asks where Rocky III came from.
Stage Climb is not a port of the beat-'em-up. Phones are the wrong shape for a side-scroller and the right shape for something else entirely: a vertical climber in the grand Donkey Kong tradition. Girders, ladders, hazards raining down, one stubborn roadie climbing a stage rig to get the gear up before the show. The DNA carried over — the characters, the venues, the art, the sense that every gig is a low-grade disaster — but the game around it was rebuilt for a portrait screen and two thumbs.
The stack is deliberately boring: SpriteKit inside a SwiftUI SpriteView, portrait-only, iPhone-only, iOS 17 and up. No engine, no middleware. SpriteKit gets a bad rap as the framework Apple forgot, but for a 2D arcade game it's all there: physics contacts, actions, particle-ish effects, and it launches instantly.
The parts I ended up most attached to are the invisible ones:
Touch controls that cheat on your behalf. A d-pad on glass is a lie we all agree to tell, so the game meets you halfway: 0.12 seconds of coyote time after you walk off a girder, a 0.16-second jump buffer so an early press still counts, and touches get assigned to the nearest button rather than strictly what's under your finger. None of it is visible. All of it is the difference between "tight" and "the controls killed me."
Procedural legs. All the character art is drawn waist-up (there are reasons — see part 2), so every character gets legs built in code: black jeans, boots, striding via hip rotation. Nobody has ever noticed. That's the point.
Five venues, one tour. You climb from a dingy bar through small venues, theaters and arenas to stadiums, each with its own palette, its own backing track, and its own objective at the top of the rig — the jukebox, the VIP, the headliner, the master tape, the star. Every fifth night there's a boss. It ramps for 100 stages.
The rest of this series is about how it got built — which is really a story about how much game a single product developer can ship in 2026 when the art department, the level QA and the release pipeline are all some flavour of robot.
This is part 1 of a five-part series on building Roadie Wars 5 : Stage Climb:
- Why our first iPhone game starts at 5
- An AI art department in a Python folder
- The whole tour is a JSON file
- Comic cutscenes and a localhost editor
- Shipping an iPhone game with a robot on the mixing desk
Roadie Wars 5 : Stage Climb is heading to the App Store — climb the rig, save the tour.