Development process
Concept:
The origin of Mine! Mine! Mine! came into place as of late 2017, I wanted to create an endless top-down shooting game where the goal of the game was to collect as many points as possible. With this in mind, I included enemies and obstacles to prevent the player from achieving this goal; however, in order to make the gameplay fair, I also included bonuses, such as power-ups and traps to make the game more manageable and interesting.
In short, the player is tasked to defend their home from intruders wanting to steal the player's points. In each game the player is set with 10 points, In which they must protect by shooting down incoming enemies or using traps, in doing so, the player will be able to rack up their points. However, if the player does not manage to shoot or trap any incoming enemies, an enemy will be able to get into the player's treasure bank, which holds the player's current points and steal a random amount of points. Having said that, the player can recover their stolen points back, plus more, by shooting the enemy before they leave the game's stage. If the player's point system reaches 0, it is a game over, consequently, if the player gets shot and loses all their lives, it is a game over. The main goal of the game is to gain as many points as possible and to see how long the player as survived for.
I wanted to have my game to look very friendly and vibrant to capture audience attention, as such I decided to go with a cartoony aesthetic to target the game to everyone one of all ages. Having a cartoonish style also matches with the fantasy type nature of my game, each skin triggers different and quirky animations and particles that is ultimately designed to interest my audience.
The layout of my game is designed to attract the user, any components used, I design them to be simple and straightforward to use, such as including buttons, images as well as animated buttons for the user to distinguish easily. I have also included large text with a simple font type within my game for the player to read and understand any information provided.
Currently, the game is available on Android, nevertheless, I hope to introduce my game to IOS in order to reach out to a wider fan base.
In short, the player is tasked to defend their home from intruders wanting to steal the player's points. In each game the player is set with 10 points, In which they must protect by shooting down incoming enemies or using traps, in doing so, the player will be able to rack up their points. However, if the player does not manage to shoot or trap any incoming enemies, an enemy will be able to get into the player's treasure bank, which holds the player's current points and steal a random amount of points. Having said that, the player can recover their stolen points back, plus more, by shooting the enemy before they leave the game's stage. If the player's point system reaches 0, it is a game over, consequently, if the player gets shot and loses all their lives, it is a game over. The main goal of the game is to gain as many points as possible and to see how long the player as survived for.
I wanted to have my game to look very friendly and vibrant to capture audience attention, as such I decided to go with a cartoony aesthetic to target the game to everyone one of all ages. Having a cartoonish style also matches with the fantasy type nature of my game, each skin triggers different and quirky animations and particles that is ultimately designed to interest my audience.
The layout of my game is designed to attract the user, any components used, I design them to be simple and straightforward to use, such as including buttons, images as well as animated buttons for the user to distinguish easily. I have also included large text with a simple font type within my game for the player to read and understand any information provided.
Currently, the game is available on Android, nevertheless, I hope to introduce my game to IOS in order to reach out to a wider fan base.
Pre-production:
As I am an indie developer, my team consists of three individuals; myself and two of my siblings. I worked as the head producer, my sibling helped with the art and my other sibling help with the implementation of the game. To lay down the foundation of the game, I came up with an outline of the game's concept to my programmer and artist.
In the process, we decided what engine and software's would be the best option for us to use as well as creating the design for the main character, developing a storyboard and detailing gameplay mechanics to my programmer. After assembling the storyboard and mechanics of our game, we were able to build a prototype which then allowed us to start the production process.
In the process, we decided what engine and software's would be the best option for us to use as well as creating the design for the main character, developing a storyboard and detailing gameplay mechanics to my programmer. After assembling the storyboard and mechanics of our game, we were able to build a prototype which then allowed us to start the production process.
Production:
During the production process, we were able to use the design of the prototype to build the game, however, as neither of us had much experience in programming and animation, thus prompting us to learn through online tutorials and documentation. As the pre-production stage serves as the blueprint of our game; we decided to create the design of our main character first, since I wanted the concept to be a top-down shooting game, I wanted the design to be 2D; from there we created the background and the enemies design.
We choose to use Unity Engine for the production of our game, based on the fact that the engines graphics system and physics allowed us to create our game in a 2D environment easily. The engine also provided us with an of useful documentation, forums and YouTube videos to help my programmer implement the main mechanics of our game, such as movement (player and enemy movement), spawning objects in (spawn bullets and enemies) and deleting objects (destroying enemy objects when collides with bullet object).
After creating the basis of our game, we then started adding more to our game as the time when on in order to make the game more interesting to play and indulging to look at. Such as creating fun and wacky interactions with the main character and each enemy character, as well as including free sound effects from freesounds.org and the game's background music, purchased from Fiverr by a music producer and audio engineer named Kurt Moulison (4Ground Audio).
The production of our background music proceeded exceptional, as communication with what we wanted with Kurt was straightforward and he was able to produce remarkable game music in different versions. Because of this, we were able to use two different versions of the game music to our advantage and make the game seem more fast-paced by changing the version 1 of the game music to version 2 of the game music whenever the player gets below a point system of 10, this was done in order to make the user more frantic to save their point system and rack it back up to or above 10.
We choose to use Unity Engine for the production of our game, based on the fact that the engines graphics system and physics allowed us to create our game in a 2D environment easily. The engine also provided us with an of useful documentation, forums and YouTube videos to help my programmer implement the main mechanics of our game, such as movement (player and enemy movement), spawning objects in (spawn bullets and enemies) and deleting objects (destroying enemy objects when collides with bullet object).
After creating the basis of our game, we then started adding more to our game as the time when on in order to make the game more interesting to play and indulging to look at. Such as creating fun and wacky interactions with the main character and each enemy character, as well as including free sound effects from freesounds.org and the game's background music, purchased from Fiverr by a music producer and audio engineer named Kurt Moulison (4Ground Audio).
The production of our background music proceeded exceptional, as communication with what we wanted with Kurt was straightforward and he was able to produce remarkable game music in different versions. Because of this, we were able to use two different versions of the game music to our advantage and make the game seem more fast-paced by changing the version 1 of the game music to version 2 of the game music whenever the player gets below a point system of 10, this was done in order to make the user more frantic to save their point system and rack it back up to or above 10.
Post-production:
Over the years, we have found many bugs within our game, which we were able to fix and overcome. We wanted to make sure our game was perfect before uploading it to the Google Play Store as an Alpha build. During the time, we had more of our family member to test the game out to find any bugs and was rechecked by my programmer for any necessary changes. Once the game was fully tested by close members, we rolled out our game to production and we began to market our game.