So finally I have some time to write something about the development process. I am just gonna ramble through it from start to end, talk a little about our thoughts about Unity, some plattform rambling and some thoughts we had before we started the project.
Anyway, we started the project in May but didn't have the whole team fulltime since we had some ports left to fix for our last game Slam Dunk Basketball. We have been working with our own tools in Marmalade SDK before but got hold of a few pro licenses to Unity so we decided to give it a try. As the artist of the team I was hooked right away, everything was super smooth with asset handling, formats and workflow. Graphic wise it handles really much alike Autodesk Maya and handles Photoshop workfiles directly.
So we had the general idea of what the game would be, we had a simple prototype with line drawn shapes etc. From the get go we wanted the game to be paid and also have the option of in-apps. So we started working and the coders started learning Unity, I can't lie there were some screaming and cursing in the beginning
What we had most issues with was really balancing the difficulty, our first beta test was a disaster. Some testers didn't even make it past level 4. So we rethought the system that spawns shapes so that it is a little more dependent on how fast the player is. At earlier levels you can't even die since we really wanted the players to get the chance to understand the game before they started struggling. So we shifted focus for the difficulty towards the stars, some levels are a little more difficult spawn wise but the real difficulty is getting three stars.
We also changed the way you activated powerups in the last second. At first you could tap the powerup and chose what target it should have but we noticed that people didn't really get that fast enough so now it's one tap and the powerup choses it's target automaticly. The blitz mode is also something that was added in the last few weeks since we noticed that we could create it quite easily and thank god for that since figures show that a lot of players are playing Blitz.
Other than that I must say it was quite straight forward, there were a lot of changes and polishing graphics wise. I'll post some early captures so you can see the different stages of art polish.
This is a real early mockup in photoshop, the character is a placeholder to give the idea of the creatures living in the world.
This is the first capture I have from inside the game, the placeholder gui is there and we were experimenting with some reflective water but it got scrapped.
This is a photoshop capture of the first drafts of the GUI and a updated version of the backdrop
This image is quite close to the final backdrop and this is the concept the characters were created from. This is drawn but the idea of the characters were to create a rig that could be animated with a lot of expressions. We came quite close but everything is easier to achieve in photoshop
This is the final backdrop for the first world that shipped. There is quite a differance from the first image but the most basic buildblocks are still there.
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