We have finally reached week 12 and with that the finishing of this project.

It has been a great experience doing a full game development cycle from ideation to finish.

Let’s look back on some of the important steps of development.

When I started collating all the pictures and went through my weekly builds, I realised how much this game evolved. If someone finishes a project it does not mean the project cannot be better and it is perfect as it is. It means completing a big milestone and getting the development phase done with a viable, enjoyable product in our hands. There could always be more room for development and improvement, but there should be an ending to every project due to the time restraints we have.

Here is a little compilation of the different stages this project went through:

And here is another compilation of the game as it looks now:

Here's a quick gameplay video of the final experience:

It all started with an idea that I wanted to build a ’game for change’, in a probably nature focused topic. Then, sitting and chatting in a park and looking at the trees around me, I decided that I wanted to create a game that will help trees somehow. Mainly passively through story / gameplay bringing awareness to an issue to players and not directly educating them – as those games can feel somewhat boring and school-like.

Since the Pre-production of this game I decided that I wanted to create the assets hand painted with watercolour and then digitalise them and bring them in. I was thinking how could I make this special and at the same time also communicate its message through the art. As using classical arts and crafts in the digital space is a good metaphore for going back to nature – „the origins” and allowing it to grow and cities to become greener.

As you can see Mushin, the character of the game evolved the most – starting from a pencil drawing of a mushroom with a ’smoking’ hat.

I always realise while reflecting back on making game art how much the cartoons you watched and games you played and any other childhood experiences influence how your art turns out. I watched a lot of Moomin valley as a kid and the final character reminds me a lot to a mixture of Moomin and Snufkin. The buildings are similar to the Russian – ex-Soviet housing buildings we used to have a lot in Hungary (where I’m from).

This is also valid for the game mechanics and gameplay experiences that you create. All games you played so far including all boardgames, role playing games and other children toys will influence the game experience you will create. I always liked chill, not too stressful, not too competitive, easy to learn, quick to play games, so my game became just like that. I would never really be able to create a heavily competitive fighting game or horror game as I always avoided those. It is always good to know what your interests and skills are so your planning and expectations will be realistic. You don’t have to lose your confidence if you are failing in making something you have never really tried before. It might just be an indication that you need to do more research, re-think your timing, or modify your plan / idea to fit your skillset more.

I always believed in smart but simple ideas. It requires a lot of effort to create something that is simple yet fun and enjoyable. Knowing my programming skills and my time frames I really wanted to create a simple puzzle game or similar that does not require 2 additional people to develop, so that I can focus on creating art, rather than stressing out about programming the whole semester. Although, this game is physics-based and included certain coding challenges, the main gameplay could be coded and tested during the pre-production phase, which allowed good time for fine-tuning, expanding & testing.

One of the biggest challenges was to include the story of the game into this simple gameplay. Since I think and create based on stories, any idea that required me to alter or modify the story, scared me quite a bit. If the story is not right, my whole thinking process stops until I can solve the story problem. Therefore, I wished to communicate well the story for players too. So that they don’t feel they’re only playing a flipper-type game. I wanted them to feel the meaningfulness in it. Otherwise, I felt I’d lose the point.

One lesson learnt from this is that all players are different – the players who are not very interested in stories and just want to push the button and play or analyse mechanics – these people still will not either get or bother about understanding the story. And this is perfectly fine. We are all different. That is why we enjoy so different games too. Reminding myself who my target audience is was a good idea to come back to. The people who probably search for similar things in games like myself enjoyed the game and found both the story and chill gameplay to be enjoyable. 

Other than this, I feel the story got well implemented in the gameplay with the short in-game animations and intro scene explaining about it.

I also had to think of the branding of Endring. Therefore, a logo needed to be created.I like creating logos, I feel the motivation to find the message and right meaning through motifs and symbolism.
I feel it reflects the game quite well - the balance between urban and nature, the character, the playfulness and the watercolour art style.

Coding-wise, one of the biggest challenges was to create the GameSceneManager and its logic as it is quite complex and it needs to maintain many aspects of the game. It required quite a lot of thinking and planning to create the best way and best logic.

I made good friends with DOTween engine as once set up, it can be used for many animations very easily.

I also did an experiment by creating a great animation and effect for the character in AfterEffects, exported the frames as png files and imported the sequence to Unity. It needed some work as there were unneccesarily too many frames that made my project file quite big. I needed to use compression settings which can be life-saving if you create small games. Other than this, it works well and nice and cool animation effects can be brought over this way.

Based on player testing and also reflecting back, there are a few things that are good to learn from and were not precedented in the planning phase.

For example, the speed of the game – without noticing the whole gameplay is a bit slow, the way how the ball bounces and travels through the scene, the animations are a bit slow-paced. A few testers mentioned it too, others found it to be good for a chill game like this. Setting the project time higher than one would have helped, however unfortunately, that made the whole animation sequences to be mixed up and was a too costy last-minute change that I had to leave out. Next time, minding the play time would also need to be considered.

There were of course certain things that I did not get a time to develop. For example, I would have loved this game to be translated to mobile as this type of game would work really well and fit the mobile environment.

The basic gameplay could have gotten more interesting and more challenging by introducing some new mechanics, like moving obstacles or environmental factors like wind or rain. However, I am glad that the mechanics are still somewhat challenging and the challenge got gradually increasing.

The latter needed some last minute work. As the game became a bit too complex by the 5 bumper forces and the more bumpers placed on the scene. To easen this and to give an indication for the players on the force levels to set, I implemented a ’frozen’ type bumper with a pre-set force. This way, players only need to set less bumpers and can precedent the force needed a bit better than before. The game became a lot easier and more quickly playable.

Overall, I am happy with this mini game. I definitely learnt a lot from making it and it definitely expanded my skills and knowledge. Making games is a long and tricky process.

I loved creating the assets as I could escape from the digital space to my painting tools. It was also good to see my painting skills develop from week to week. Now, I’m at the point of creating painted post cards for Christmas for my family... :) You never know what comes out of something new. My main advice is to experiment and allow your mind to soar. Don’t limit your ideas by thinking you need to follow a certain pattern or that you’ve read an article of what’s ’cool’ and your idea doesn’t fit the scheme. I always find that doing something different naturally by listening to your gut feeling will lead to success.