Working on a game project is always a challenge. It’s a clash of egos, clash of ideas and clash with the reality of insufficient coffee available.
Once we decided that the game is going to take place in outer space and you as the Player will have to arrange them in a certain way, we knew that we’re going to need a level designer.
That’s when Angelika joined the team.
At first, I thought that as an aspiring designer she would rather make a good writer than designer. I had the pleasure of reading one of her stories which was catchy and sparkled my imagination. I knew she was a creative mind.
Once she had shown us her designs on paper I immediately knew that she’s the person for the job.
Angelika had proven being skilled with diagrams, paper design and Unity. She quickly grasps what the hook of the game was and created a number of levels. We would then test out the levels. They were difficult as hell. We had to make changes.
Luckily we had chosen Unity3D to work with. It’s an accessible development engine well suited for 2D games. There’s a vast knowledge base over the Internet. This was important for Daniel as he learned the ropes as we went on with the development. Early on we also decided that we want the game to be fun on touch devices and Unity3D allowed us to quickly prototype and test the game on small screens and tablets.
Of course, developing for iOS and Android is more than just clicking “Build” but we established a few design rules that would allow us to avoid rebuilding the whole game once we begin working on mobile versions of the game.
A few of the rules we had been:
– Having everything that is playable fit a 4:3 aspect ratio screen
– Avoiding using small interactive gameplay elements
– Not having gameplay elements cross or cover each other
– Keeping the memory usage to a minimum
With this in mind we began working out the looks for our game which you can learn about in another post.
Thanks for reading and see you there.
Cheers,
Daniel
