Mobile Game Prototype: New & Updated Tiles
Hello there, welcome back.
It's been fairly calm this past week, which means I get to break up the monotony of looking at code by looking at artwork instead. I've gone ahead with tidying up some of the previous ice tiles which looked slightly off, as well as adding some walls for the perimeter of our maze. I felt like Deadpool when he did his Bob Ross skit for the Deadpool 2 trailer.
So, with that said, let's dive right on in and show you all the pretty new artwork that I've created this week.
Ice, Ice Baby
As mentioned, I've gone ahead and tidied up the images for the ice floor that weren't quite seamless, and I think it now looks considerably better:
Next up are the wall pieces. I based these off of the ones found in the Pokémon games with some small adjustments and a different colour palette. Hey, if it ain't broke, right? Here are the individual pieces first:
This won't look very impressive on its own, which is why I've gone ahead and created these little examples of how it would all look altogether:
Ta-da! Pretty cool, right?
Now that you've finished rolling your eyes to that pun, my team and I got some feedback and additional info regarding our project requirements & expectations which you can read about below.
Professional Feedback & Next Steps
Earlier this week, a handful of groups presented their game ideas & early works to the senior developer from King - Juliette - that we have aiding our learning during our mobile game development. There was a speaker from each group, and from ours I volunteered to show myself on MS Teams and speak about our idea in front of the class, our lecturer and Juliette.
The feedback we got was unexpectedly great; everything I pitched to Juliette made sense to her and she seemed to really like the idea and the direction we wanted to go in, and didn't have any questions. I was sure I would be put on the spot more, but I guess it went smoother than I thought! Juliette particularly liked the idea of multiple pathways out of each maze, with her only suggestion being that we made our additional objectives into bonuses. The reason being that it would create a linear path in order to finish the levels, which makes sense, so the team and I will alter this accordingly.
Furthermore, it seems we are 1 of 3 teams our lecturer feels are "ahead" of the pack which I think is also a very encouraging sign for us! I definitely think that has revitalized our enthusiasm for our concept and reassured the team considerably.
So! What's next?
With the more critical assets now made, our programmer can now bring these into our Unity project and start setting up the sprites properly inside the editor. Our game designer also now has some proper materials to work with when creating levels for us, so we will see some of her designs next week.
Regarding the levels, it seems the plan now is to have the first 5 levels and 5 late game levels implemented by the time January arrives. The late game levels are meant to be reflective of what the user might see after having played the game for a while. This is where we can showcase how we would incorporate our monetization strategies to reflect our understanding of how to generate income in the mobile app market, although purchasing features and such won't actually be implemented.
Closing Thoughts
That about covers this week's updates. I'll be creating more environment pieces for us, like rocks, that we can place inside the maze. I'll be taking a look at the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games to get some additional inspiration for this, and help out where needed in other areas of our project. We had some issues using GitHub, where the sprite data disappeared and caused us some grief for a few hours, but our programmer has managed to figure it out luckily! It did take a fair bit of digging around though to find the solution.
Looks like that's it! I hope you enjoyed the pixel art, thanks for reading through this post and I'll catch you next week - buh bye! :)