Pages

Monday, May 16, 2016

Dev Journal 02: Analysis & Start Up

Hello again and welcome to Dev Journal Numbers Dos!

On my previous post I’ve talked about what gave us the idea to start working on this new project as well a briefly talked about why we decided to work on it. I’ll go over a little in depth on what we did to conclude our decision as well as what we did to further expand the simple game idea.

So, after we had a potential idea for a game we headed over to the iOS and Android markets to search if the game has already been made. This won’t discourage us from making the game if we find a similar game, what we’ll do is compare the features and gameplay of that game, then we look into how we can still make a unique game, but, to our luck there isn’t a game in either App Market that’s similar to ours. Great News for us, now we started downloading games that are similar in style and gameplay to gather ideas and see what’s popular amongst players and what specific features are found in all of them.

This step took a while as we had to play them to get ideas and understand the feel of the game. Some of them forced us to create accounts (something I really despise on games, this FORCED account creation thing) and other “Free” games had annoying ads for every menu navigation as well as pop ups that make you accidentally tap on the ad. I’m not mentioning the games we played now because you’d get an idea of what we’re developing. I’ll leave that for later once we unveiled our game.

After nearly filling out our phones with games, we concluded that our planned game is unique and have enough gameplay mechanics to stand out amongst others.

Since our game can be played on paper, we took a couple of our friends and show them the game. We demo the game from its basic gameplay as well as conditions and objectives that we added to vary the gameplay and we received mostly positive feedback. This is a puzzle game so, of course, it’s not appealing to everyone.

I have to say that when I saw enjoyment on our test players while playing the game we’re creating it gave me a sense of accomplishment and it’s the best feeling ever, so, me and my brother knew we were up to something.

So, with all this information about the game, we’re now moving into the “design” of the game. And that is something I’ll leave for the next Journal Entry.

Gotta be honest, I’m getting a little tired of writing the word “Game”, I’ll look at the thesaurus and find an alternative for it.

FINAL NOTES:  I know I said I was going to write about the “setup” of the game, but, I wrote a lot about our progress on how we tested the game and how we got to the Design phase that I just had to device the Journal Entry. Sorry for the misleading Subject. I won’t write the subject on the next Journal Entry unless I know for sure what I’m going to write about. I write this Journal as I work on the game throughout 2 weeks, I edit them just so they make more sense and it’s a LOT of text to go through.

This Journal is still something I’m working on and see what style suits me best so, gimme some time as I find my best style. I’ll try keeping ‘em short as well as informative.


Thanks for reading, as always, if you want to keep up with my Journal Entry or other update, follow us on Facebook or Twitter. See you all next time!!

- GerLuNiMa