DETAILS
Genre: Action, Casual
Format: Single Player Arcade Game
Platform: iOS, Android
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DESIGN TENETS
* Simple
* Prudent
* Fresh
The intention behind this was to make a casual game that maintains the intensity of an action game, but provides a refreshing twist that gets the player thinking.
Traditional shoot-em-up games provide a level of endless and effortless action that rely on fast paced game mechanics. Integrating recent experiments with four dimensional mathematics and visualizations in Unity turned out to be the perfect mix: easy to understand action mechanics with a slight requirement of strategic thinking for the best blend of fun and challenge.
The simplicity comes from tried and true input modalities of dragging your finger to move and pressing a singular UI button to interact. The macro game elements; however, lend itself to much more strategy: players can change the map layout (including the enemies) at their will. This allows players to feel much more comfortable with the core gameplay of dodging and crashing into enemies, while allowing them the agency and tactical thinking to choose which current map configuration is best for the moment.
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHTS
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHT: TRAVELING ACROSS DIMENSIONS
Design tenets: simple, prudent, fresh.
Mathematically, this game has four spatial dimensions, with the player having the ability to travel along the fourth dimension. This may be a tough concept for every player to understand immediately, which clashes with the idea of "simplicity" for this game. Instead, the idea of multiple "dimensions" in the empirical sense is leveraged, with the player being granted the ability to change the entire game environment with the single touch of a button.
This is a much more intuitive representation of the concept of 4D, and allows the player to focus current configuration of the map so that they may maneuver and defeat enemies. The best way to emphasis this core component of the game is through a singular "travel" button that spans the majority of the width of the screen, and an ever changing mini map view of the next map layout when that button is pressed.
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHT: CRASHING
Design tenets: simple, prudent, fresh.
With the prudence coming from the ability to change the map layout, the simplicity must come from the more micro and core components of the game. Players are tasked to simply "crash into enemies." This straight forward directive clears the mental bandwidth for the idea of the shifting environment, and allows the intensity and fun to shine through as players bombard various enemies all around the map.
There is only but a single condition to crash into enemies: that they appear as spheres in the current map configuration. There is no health system or enemies who must be destroyed across different map configurations; players need to change map layouts until they find spherical enemies.
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHT: ONBOARDING
Design tenets: simple, prudent, fresh.
Player understanding is crucial to this game, so players are presented with a mandatory interactive onboarding in which they are able to run through the core mechanics of the game in a small enclosure.
They are presented with the ability to travel across dimensions, crashing into enemies when they are spherical and weak, and the caution of not smashing into an enemy when they are not spherical, especially the walls and obstacles.
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ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS
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ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHT: GOOGLE AD SERVICES
This game is intended to be a casual action game, nothing more or less, so there is no in-app purchases, pay-to-play, or stringent monetary pipelines that bloat and complicate the player's experience. Instead, this game's monetization relies that on optional ads. There are no ads that are presented interstitially to interrupt a player's gameplay, there are no banner ads to present visual disruptions; there is only rewarded ads. Because users opt-in to these ads, and they are rewarded, means that they have a high effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM). To make the most of this maximal eCPM, Google AdMob is used in order to leverage their vast database of brands and partners looking to advertise on their platform. Their Unity SDK is used directly.
ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHT: SCRIPTABLE SHOP SYSTEM
The shop system in this game is not supported by in-app purchases or virtual in-game currency, instead it is supported by the number of ads watched. Here I used a project asset to store the shop item descriptive information, the number of ads required to purchase the item, the file path to the whether or not a player has an item, and the file path to how many times a player has watched ads specifically to buy this item.
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