Mobile Games
Description
Hyper-casual mobile games designed to be instantly playable and lightweight in their mechanics.
Project Length
6 Weeks
Genre
Hyper-Casual Mobile Games
Platform
Android
Project Overview
During the last year of my programming course, I participated in work placement at Mini Mammoth Games for two days a week for six weeks. For this project, myself and two other students (one artist and one designer) were tasked with creating two hyper casual games during the six weeks. We decided to create a experimental game and a safe game for our project, both being endless and highscore based. During this project we used a variety of assets that were provided to us since our solo artist wouldn't be able to create assets for everything we need. However all code was written from scratch by myself.
Cave Swingers
Cave swingers is a horizontal game where you use momentum and physics to swing through a cave, avoiding obstacles and hazards while collecting gems to increase your high score.
The biggest challenge to overcome when creating this game was the swinging mechanic. I went through various different methods but eventually settled on using the Unity hinge joint physics objects. By manipulating where the joint was located, I could imitate a swinging motion using Unity's physics engine and gravity. But even when I learned how to use the hinge joints, there were still of lot of bugs to work out and this took the majority of the time spent on this game.
Highway Surfers
Highway Surfers was a infinite runner where you change lanes to avoid obstacles. The production of this game went smoothly with the largest speedbump being how we were going to do physics. The score is directly tied to the distance travelled by the player and the speed is tied to how long the player survives with it eventually hitting a cap. The obstacles are randomly chosen from a set depending on certain spawned tiles, with caution from our teams designer to prevent impossible combinations.
Infinite Levels
Both Highway Surfers and Cave Swingers have infinite levels, and both were done in different ways. Both games used prefabs that were made to be joined together to make a full level, however Cave Swingers originally wasn't going to be a infinite runner and was going to be level based, so the tiles weren't initially created with that in mind. This caused different tiles to be misaligned in length and height. This mistake was fixed with by creating custom spawn points based on tile, which was a little bit clunky but it worked in the end.
For our second game, Highway Surfers, we knew we wanted an infinite runner so we prepared that from the beginning. Every tile prefab was exactly the same length and width so I spawned the new tiles at the exact distance I needed. But Highway surfers introduced a new issue, hiding the spawned tiles. With Cave Swingers, hiding the spawning prefabs was easy because the game view was from the side, so the tiles spawned off screen. Highway Surfers game view was facing forward, so the player could see the tiles pop in. This was circumvented by created a shader that had the world warp around the horizon like we were on a small planet. This shader could have the effect be as intense or as subtle as we wanted and it not only created a pleasant effect, but also solved our issue of the tiles popping in.