Categories
Mammoths

Welcome To A World Of Herberts!

Welcome To A World Of Herberts!

As a small intro to this blog I’d like to introduce Herbert, our beloved and adorable Mini Mammoth ‘mascot’. Herbert has existed since the blossoming days of Mini Mammoth Games. To allow staff and supporters of us to also get to know Herbert we have created an array of ways for people to interact with him!

This initial idea was inspired by streamers and specifically twitch streamers and their use of custom emotes. This came as a way to easily help with announcements on our social media accounts, having a happy and celebrating mammoth sounded like a great way to help grab viewers attention. This also gives the Mini Mammoth brand a very recognisable character which can also be found snoozing within our logo.

Here are your basic emotes with multiple emotions to choose from:

If you want a little more spice to your emotes we have these fun ones to choose from:

The only place where you will currently be able to access and use these emotes will be on the Roving Rovers discord. Where you might find some extras that we haven’t shared here:

Thanks to everyone supporting us and Roving Rovers!

Find our socials here:

Find Roving Rovers’ here:

Categories
Events

Melbourne International Games Week 2022

Melbourne International Games Week of 2022

This year Mini Mammoth Games was able to go to Melbourne International Games Week for the first time! We managed to make it to all four events and had an excellent time there, being able to interact with both South Australian developers and developers from across the country. It was an unforgettable experience.

Here is a short recap of our time!

GCAP

At GCAP our goal was to both increase our professional network, while also learning practical skills that can be applied in our day to day game developer work from the variety of talks and panels available. GCAP ended up being a great experience overall with lots of industry connections being made and a variety of talks on a diverse range of topics. Stand out talks and panels were: See That Mountain, You Can Climb It by Osama DorIas and the panel on Queer Games.

We hope to be back next year with more of our team members to learn even more.

AGDAs

Rounding out GCAP were the Australian Game Developer Awards. This was a great experience to see just how big the games industry is in Australia, and the amazing games from Australian developers over the last year. For us, It was also a great excuse to dress up and look fancy (insert photo) while taking advantage of the catered food and drink. Throughout the night we talked to and met different people, not just other developers but the IGEA representatives who helped keep everything orderly too. All in all, the night was fantastic and we are looking forward to returning next year!

Photo of 3 Mini Mammoth Games' staff members and another attendee at the 2022 AGDA awards night

Games For Change APAC

Asia Pacific Convention ran concurrently with GCAP and involved both a teachers summit and 2 days of panels from industry representatives. The summit had a diverse array of teaching representatives from Kindergarten teachers through to University Lectures and educators covering the gap. Between lectures from organisations such as Scienceworks to practical exercises that taught teachers how to teach through games, the first ever Games for Change Festival was a raging success. Each evening allowed Mini Mammoth Games developers to connect with different industry representatives in networking drinks, and we were even able to chat with the managing director of G4C, Arana Shapiro. She had us sold on their mission in moments, and now we are die hard G4C supporters!

PAX

Rounding out the week was the 3 days we spent exhibiting Idle Gangs at PAX! Our main goal here was to get as many people to play the game and provide feedback as possible, while also providing awareness of our brand. Pax proved a huge success in this regard as we estimate around 500 people played Idle gangs over the weekend. This provided us with invaluable feedback and we left with multiple pages of notes detailing ways to improve the game. Feedback covered everything from the speed through which players should progress through our tutorial, to fine detail about the way different effects should feel. PAX is single handedly responsible for the feedback that lead to our muggables being trampled for extra money. Sometimes, it’s all about the little things.

PAX also proved to be a great learning opportunity as our first exhibit at a convention. We realised very early on that we should have bought a dev machine with us so we could update the game each evening, fixing small bugs and providing us with a better way to exhibit the game. Next time we will be far better prepared!

Image of Mini Mammoth Games' booth at PAX 2022

Overall, we had a great time in Melbourne, travelling between venues and meeting a variety of people. Being able to meet developers from around Australia and learn from them was something that Mini Mammoth is looking forward to experiencing again next year!

Congrats to every developer and their achievements this year!

Categories
Development Processess Prototypes

First Prototype Week of 2022

We started 2022 diving straight into client work, since finishing those we have finally done our first run of prototypes. We have created a range of games spanning from drawing to a card dungeon crawler.
A quick run down of our games can be found below!

Card Crawler

“Play cards in a mystical ruined temple to speed through obstacles and debris, collecting new skills and building your deck as you travel.”

 

We wanted to take inspiration from the TCG space from games like Yu-Gi-Oh and Magik. We love playing these games in general so turning something similar into a virtual experience was definitely a fun experience for us. I really loved making the Level system, I just quite enjoy making systems that work in the background of everything else.

The shader effects on the cards was also a really fun exercise to explore the art side of things as a designer. Getting the metal esc look of the cards and rainbow effects was awesome!

We faced some challenges trying to get a cohesive setup and wrap up each individual system so they worked well together. Most of the straight systems when tested by themselves worked however some features like required cards for levels didn’t come into play until the very end of the development cycle.

Donut io: Shoot Race Collect

Donut Game is a pvp King of the Hill styled game.

Collect Ingredients to level up your donut and increase in size.

Hunt down the leader of your world to take the top spot and become king 

Destroy other players to plunder their ingredients to take for yourself.

We wanted to create a multiplayer hyper casual game that’s accessible to all, so we looked at pre-existing ones in the market and saw mostly battle royale games and .io games so we decided to create a more generic multiplayer game to start off with that could change into either. We ended up going with the .io approach since it was the easiest to accomplish whilst having very minimal limitations. Also we just like the idea of donuts fighting….soo we went with it.

For the art style we went with a more low poly cartoon style since we already had pre-existing packs available and we knew that the major pieces that we needed wouldn’t take long to create “The Donut”.

The major challenge for the project that we faced would be with multiplayer. Since it’s a new system that we are trying to integrate with our pre existing workflows and processes. Also it just had a lot of problems with syncing between users.

Ocean Harvest

“Charm fishy friends in this frantic underwater drawing game”

 Using ocean harvest assets saved a lot of time and gave us high quality, cohesive assets to use. Plop’s design lends well to being dragged around and using rigid bodies to be “floppy”.

The most important and most difficult part of Ocean Party was the shape recognition algorithm. We implemented a basic system based upon the $1 Unistroke Recognizer modified to be easier to work with in Unity which was modified numerous times over the game’s development to work better with the shapes and other systems. The main challenge was ensuring that the algorithm could accurately detect the shapes, even when the player’s drawing was not accurate. This required a lot of fine tuning to the templates used for comparison and adjusting some of the values put into the algorithm.

After prototype runs we do some marketing campaigns to find out whether these games have any viability regardless of if they do or don't follow current trends. Fingers crossed we get a smash hit!

Categories
Mammoths

Mammoth Hair Style Tips

When we think of the majestic mammoth our thoughts tend to lean towards a large imposing mammal that could strike us down with minimal effort. But what if we thought of them as large gentle dog-like creatures? Similar to how rhinos and elephants can be quite friendly and docile when shown love and care, what if we view them as such?

Much like how we dress up and decorate our own furry friends, why can’t we do the same to our much larger furry friends? For example we could use their luscious locks and create unique and personable hairstyles or haircuts to show off how silly, goofy or imposable they are. Their hair can range from a dark brown to a warm orange or a pale blonde, this also implies pet safe hair dye could also be used for a fun splash of colour.

Mammoths had 2 coats, the outer coat that consisted of long hair and then the shorter undercoat. This allows for a range of differing styles as they can have hairstyles for both longer and shorter hair or a combo of both, this is important!

Here are a few of our suggestions should you find a mammoth friend!

Hairstyles for the head:

Hairstyles for the body:

Hairstyles for the tail:

Now that you have seen our suggestions, how will you show off your mammoth friend?

Categories
Development Processess

Ocean Harvest

Mini Mammoth's adventure into the Arcade Idle genre through Ocean Harvest!

Hi everyone, I am a developer and project manager with Mini Mammoth Games.If you didn’t already know, Mini Mammoth creates games for the Hyper Casual Space, and we love to explore new genres and ideas. Our current focus is Ocean Harvest, an arcade idle starring Big Oss, a loveable fellow pondering about in the depths looking for renewable resources to ship home to the surface. Ocean Harvest is a fun game where the player explores the depths of the ocean, unlocking new places with the resources they harvest. Everywhere in Ocean Harvest is unique and handcrafted, with an eye towards making each space surprising and fun.

Ocean Harvest is built in conjunction with Homa Games, a French based publisher. We developed the idea during their Homa Jam, an arcade idle focused game jam they ran in the middle of 2021. We were excited to put together something ocean themed with lots of fun colours and ideas thrown about. Our first pass on Ocean Harvest was completed in about a week. Hexagon tiles, farming robots and domed farms were everywhere. Oss was able to stagger about on a coral strewn, sandy sea floor sowing and harvesting kelp, fish, salvage and minerals. With our first pass completed it was clear we had stumbled onto something special when Homa announced Ocean Harvest as their developer favourite in their Jam Awards.

After that announcement, we had to focus down on the core of Ocean Harvest. Analytics for our product showed that people were interested in the ideas of Ocean Harvest, but that its current implementation was driving them away after 6 about 6 minutes of play. We audited the game and development process, and came back to the project fresh with a better understanding of the core loop. The audit process involves repeated play sessions and feedback sessions on the current build, followed by group sessions where we discussed the implementation. It’s a more focused post mortem that takes place over a week rather than one meeting. 

 

When we finished our audit it was clear that Ocean Harvest is all about exploration. Everything in the product has to lean back into that moment of discovery. New tiles come with new opportunities to find new resources, upgrades and buffs. The environment is focused on being different every hex you discover. Our second pass dramatically improved on these aspects and we started to hone in on key problems. Performance became a priority as well as level design and interaction loops. The process of iteration accelerated and we started planning month sprints around this new version of our loveable game. We ran a first pass on the harvesting and environment in our first sprint, pulling out pre bought assets, changing the layout and path process for tiles and updating a lot of the initial mechanics around buying hexes. We even got a first pass completed on a mini map, though it was far from perfect. Our next sprint continued to focus on performance. We ripped out even more pre bought assets, switched camera angles and switched our target fps. Suddenly, Ocean Harvest stopped making phones so hot you couldn’t hold them, and it looked better as well. More work continued in updating how SUCCs (our automated robot assistants) engaged with the player and their work, giving them emotes and interactions with the player. We even have a first pass on a tutorial completed, so that new players get walked through the game by a gorgeous little octopus nicknamed Plop. That’s where you find us.

We have just wrapped up our second sprint, and the changes that are coming to Ocean Harvest are so dramatic that the game is barely recognisable. Everything from performance to the basic interactions has had a dramatic upgrade. Mini games abound, lootable chests can be found everywhere and you have a direct role in cleaning the ocean and creating a more sustainable future for the seabed. We hope to see you all in our newest update, and that you love it! 

We have just wrapped up our second sprint, and the changes that are coming to Ocean Harvest are so dramatic that the game is barely recognisable. Everything from performance to the basic interactions has had a dramatic upgrade. Mini games abound, lootable chests can be found everywhere and you have a direct role in cleaning the ocean and creating a more sustainable future for the seabed. We hope to see you all in our newest update, and that you love it! 

Categories
Events

International Womens Day 2022

How Having Women Founders Benefit Start-ups

We are Mini Mammoth Games, an 8 piece indie game studio based in Adelaide. We develop a wide range of hyper casual games for both the Android and iOS mobile platforms.

When creating a startup, the identity of those who are a part of the team might not seem to really matter, however today Anja and myself (Tamara) are going to explain exactly why having women and other minorities actually benefits and expands the opportunities your business encounters as it grows.

 

To start off with; we have given Mini Mammoth Games access to a far larger audience as well as being able to interact with other female gamers in safe and inclusive environments. These include female only discord servers and other forums, enabling us to reach and get feedback directly from an often overlooked part of the community. Discord servers such as Honey Hive have provided a safe and inclusive environment for female and gender non conforming gamers, allowing them to play with an accepting community in multiplayer games without having to worry about how they are treated. Having access to this group and having understood the need for such groups, we can make sure that any games we make will have the best chance of allowing this community to play as safely as possible.

 

Furthermore, having a more diverse group of founders also extends Mini Mammoths access to grants, mentors and monetary support that is available for female led/founded companies and projects. Groups such as Chooks SA, encourage and help female entrepreneurs with getting investment. The group allows women to become more confident with pitching for investors, but also how to get investment as a female led business. Grants such as Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship and Wingsfund provide much needed support for female led businesses and projects. These encourage more women to take their career in often male dominated industries, but not necessarily male dominated companies.

 

Having a more diverse group of founders ensures that the culture of Mini Mammoth is welcoming and safe from the beginning. Allowing open discussion about how women have been and are currently treated in the industry at the start of a business allows the safety of all employees to be ensured from the moment they join, not put into practice afterwards. This encourages people of diverse communities to join Mini Mammoth as they know that we have ensured their well-being from the very start.

 

Mini Mammoth Games was created to give more opportunities for new individuals and groups in the growing Australian video game industry. Having a more diverse founding group allows us to connect directly with a wider audience, encouraging and showing that anyone can make games. We also ensure that every gamer is heard, especially as women are a significant portion of the hyper casual and mobile market audience.