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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!