Presenting the Draw game (online)

Hello! As said previously, we had to prepare a sort of pitch of our game in the works to be shown in front of Juliet (the special guest from King) and spoiler alert, it went brilliantly!

For this pitch we prepared a game demo on the phone, the best way to explain a game’s mechanics is to show, rather than tell (make it a movie, not a picture book) and I can say that we managed to explain the core drawing mechanic cleanly and elegantly.

Afterwards we spoke about how we were going to expand on the core mechanic and how we were going to structure the levels within packs in the game, the ways the levels will evolve and be designed and we spoke about what plans we had when approaching monetisation. Both Juliet and Hope (the module leader) were happy with the pitch and didn’t seem to provide any negative feedback, instead mainly giving suggestions and reasons why they liked the idea.

Our team is ahead of schedule, we do plan to keep that up! I’ll be focusing on adding our first layered mechanic, Dynamic Ink!

Creating a Drawing game for android (+ guest)

Hello! This is the first post in regards to my Game Media group project.

For this group project, we have been split into groups of 3 and required to create a game targeted for Mobile devices, with Juliet Colman from King (Yes the Candy Crush and Farm Heroes people!) acting as a motivator with her insights into the mobile gaming industry.

We’ve been back and forth planning this for about 3 weeks now (give or take) and we have decided to do a game with drawing as the key mechanic. The overall goal of each level will be to get the balls from start to finish using nothing but a limited amount of ink.

I am tasked with the programming side of this project (yay me!), Luke is in charge of the art and visual direction and Tomasso (we call him Tom) is in charge of design and overall experience. We are using Trello and teams to co-ordinate our efforts in a neat fashion.

This upcoming Wednesday, we (and like 3 other groups) have been asked to present our concept in front of Juliet and the rest of the class since we are ahead in the planning stage. HOWEVER, we decided the best thing to do was to prepare a barebones prototype! After all, you cannot tell if a core mechanic is fun until you can play with it! (at least in my eyes). So for the last week we gave ourselves a plan, Tom mocked up 2 Demo levels to play (estimated around level 5, so assuming the player has done a tutorial), Luke did basic assets for these 2 levels (very barebones) and I shoved it all together into Unity.

Ta-daaaaaaaa! ……. ok so maybe some static images doesn’t truly show what we’ve made so far. This is one of the Demo levels, you use your finger to draw on the screen (as seen in screen 2) and then when ready, the player hits the start button, then the balls drop from the dispenser as seen in the 3rd screen.

Hopefully this presentation knocks all the other groups out of the park!…. or at least someone likes it I don’t know. Hope you write again soon!

Getting up too speed!

Ohhh ok a flashy title! Now for an equally exciting text to go with it!

I can’t wait to see what I write! Its going to be great, flashy, eye-catching and most importantly, Informative of my current situation!

…..

ok I got nothing, so let me just write down what I know.

Right now I am about 6 weeks into my final year, I have just submitted both my Proposal for my dissertation project, and the react-native npm Diary App project for my Mobile Applications Module.

Up until now I have been posting weekly on my twitter Dev-blog in regards to my Dissertation, that game is going under the development title of Grid-Tactics, please check it out here!

However, now I will also be posting here on a more overall basis! With a focus on all my projects (which is… a lot yay!). Please keep an eye out for new posts!