greenlight

A puzzler for Grolsch via the great team at Skive.

goals

Similar to the Carling game, this project was aimed at a very specific audience ( To the point where we were given a full description and name for the a typical player ). The aim being to create a fun puzzle game which required the player to rely on brain power over quick reactions.

process

This project must have been one of the most agressive in terms of timescale that we've been involved with.

Storyboard for level 1

Due to that, it was decided at a very early stage that Neale ( The designer at Skive who worked on this game ) would produce the actual puzzle designs for each of the four levels, freeing me up to get a working game together. It's one of the few times that we've distanced ourselves from the actual design of a game to this degree, but it was the only way to turn it around on time.

solution

The only way to make the game was to use a real pyschics engine ( There was talk at the start of just using Flash's animating abilities to power the balls movement, but due to the complexity of the game that wasn't feasable ), and we had to adapt an open source one to suit this game.

An early placeholder image.

On the downside this meant a very steep learning curve whilst learning someone else's code to be able to alter it to suit our aims, but without taking this route the game would have badly missed it's deadline.

Because we were using this 3rd party engine with very little support, we were up against it when it came to placing the objects into the game world. Every object was stored as vector coordinates and with no scope to build even a simple editor it meant calculating all those coords by hand. This broke the workflow when assets had to be changed during the games development.

A very early mock up of the play area.

Added to this was due to the nature of the game, a realistic bouncing ball, for every change or addition we had to test every item in every possible position and combination.

result

Despite fighting against a tight deadline and working with an engine with next to no documentation for the core of the game, the game was delivered on time and the feedback from the client was excellent. Not the happiest development ever, but the end result is still a polished, highly playable game which attracted a lot of entries for the competition that Grolsch ran with it.