Disclaimer: I am currently in the middle of updating my portfolio, my apologies for the inconsistent design on individual project pages. The home page is indicative of the future design and depth of my portfolio
Bouncz is a Hyper-Casual mobile game that I developed in response to DD:PP's creation. This project features a Save/Load system, hyper casual game flow, one gesture control, escalating difficulty, and escalating rewards.
Why?
This project was created as I wanted to try my hand at creating a very simple game in the Hyper-Casual genre, it served as unique challenge to implement good game design principles while keeping the gameplay as minimalist as possible.
Lessons Learnt
This game taught me a lot about how to keep gameplay fresh for the player as gameplay persists, considering the game takes place on two planes, with one single control, on the same platforms, with the same background, I don't have to tell you how boring that would get over time. This project served as a challenge on how I should try to keep the gameplay feel unique, even though the user really is just doing the same thing.
For instance, due to how restrictive the scope of the game is I got creative and placed spikes on some platforms that disappeared after a set time - note that the timer was started when the player hit the prior platform. This change, although menial, forced the player to start looking at the next platform and taking pauses - effectively stopping them from mindlessly scrolling. Considering that these spikes only start appearing after the player reaches a score of 20, it changes up the game considerably.
I also had to come up with a spawning solution to keep up with how much progress the player could make in the game, hypothetically the player could reach score 1,000,000,000, now I don't about you, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to have 1 billion spawned platforms in the game world at once. As such I had a spawning system that would spawn a new set of 20 platforms after the player reached a score of 18, this allowed for the player to not be able to see the platforms spawning in, giving the impression that there are unlimited platforms in the game world.
This spawning system also had communication with the Game Mode, to decide what platforms to spawn, and their parameters - including whether or not to spawn as a moving platform, spike platform, or stationary platform. This system even tweaked their maximum possible spawn distance from the their previous platform. This guaranteed that the gameplay got progressively difficulty, keeping the player on their toes, and ensuring that high-scores were something to be proud of.
Every 20 platforms, the player's currency multiplier would increase, as well as the spawn rate of the green currency gem. Currency doesn't actually do anything, but hypothetically it would reward the player for reaching higher and higher scores, in essence, compounding the difficulty but giving fair rewards to match.
Noteable Systems
Parameter-based spawner
A developed a spawning system for each of the platforms, this spawner took parameters such as Difficulty, to change the platforms that it would spawn, and their personal spawn parameters.
The system also recognized when the player had left that platform and landed on another, then destroyed the former to save memory for the higher scores