‘Eggz’ - Dev Story
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Chicken (🐓) or Egg (🥚): Which Came First?
The question has riddled not only the simpler minds but the science community as well, for ages. But we’re not here to discuss that, whatever the answer to that riddle, we chose to pick our own in-house winner to be the ‘Egg’, partly because we eat ‘em every day during the most important meal of the day 🍳 so why not give them the benefit of doubt? Also they don’t bite like chickens do, so a pacifist choice. Wait what? You think chickens don’t bite? Well Sir! What do you make of this or this (That poor kid, he had it coming though). Anyhoo, on-to the main course then.
So now that we established Eggs are certainly the superior choice among all things breakfast-worthy, the million dollar question is how do you make a cool and casual mobile game on them, right? Because let’s be honest what else is there to ask. You are here and you read the words ‘Dev Story’ in the headline so you’re probably looking for a development success story. We’re happy to oblige! (but partly) So let’s take a walkthrough of how a bunch of dudes in cool t-shirts spin up a game based on eggs in no less than 60 minutes* (notice the bright shining star)
First thing’s first
INSPIRATION BABY
Since all great things (and some less greater things) have to stem from some sort of inspiration and so we too were inspired by something other than our morning breakfast food. And it was the not-so-quite rise of the casual games on our smartphones that keep us hooked even when we’re in the loo. At the time when we were brainstorming about making a game for eggs, our team was hooked to a game named Ballz. Let me stop you for a moment here, because if you haven’t played the game, it’s not what you think it is. It’s simply a game where you shoot balls (hmmm that doesn’t sound right either), okay, so it’s a brick-breaker like game where you pick a direction and shoot numbered bricks with balls and try to beat everyone around you in it including yourself.
Voila! We thought why not replace balls with eggs and suddenly we also incorporate an entirely new mechanic to play around with in the game, that mechanic would be the egg-shell strength. Get what we did? We have re-innovated, similar to how Apple makes it’s products, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So this idea brings us to our next part of the story, which is.
Nerd Alert!!!
MECHANICS
So we all like to stay at home, watch movies and play games *obviously* and we certainly hate going to the mechanic to fix our cars right? Why can’t cars self-heal, it’s the 21st century, just get on with it already, you hear this Tesla? Wait. Isn’t this blog post about the mechanics of eggs. Yes sir, eggs require mechanics too. Our eggs, i mean our game Eggz, it required intelligently built mechanics for it to work as natural as it does now. You may be wondering how did we spin-up Eggz in such a small duration, meet @smallassasin, the gooey brains and constantly-keyboard-rattling hands behind Eggz.
Here, in his words, he explains how he conjures up these mechanics.
Small Assassin: “I started off with simple gameplay mechanics i.e. adding directional velocity to egg and destroying the numbered tiles when number of tile collisions occurring equals the number represented on the tile. Using velocity was a good approach but…….”
Okay i think we heard enough small assassin, very small.
Onto the sexier part...
ARTWORK
You know what Walt Disney said about artwork “if you can dream it, you can do it”.
Although a part of me thinks he wasn’t talking about artworks tho.
Drumrolls please for our in-house legen----wait for it-----dary artist @wolverinekhan (okay that twitter handle is just awesome because you get to be the khan of khans like genghis khan and also have adamantium claws, that’s just plain awesome.)
Wolverine Khan: “....zzzzzzz......”
Note: Since he bailed out last minute on this article, imma gonna be explaining on his behalf and would try to be as inaccurate as possible. K thanks.
Right off the bat, we wanted to create an extremely casual experience and so the best way to remain cool and calm is to implement a light-hearted minimalistic artwork, that’s exactly what we did. Taking hints and references from games like Ballz, Threes (and it’s bad copies) and also some other games like Make7! Hexa Puzzle (what a ridiculous name but great game though)
We also emphasised on interactivity, it was really important (as we learnt from our previous not-so-awesome games) that we have as much animations and effects as possible, not that they are really crucial to the gameplay, just because they are really crucial to the overall experience of the gameplay. Riddle that! This included adding a nice little singing birdie in the main menu, but without the singing sound because she sounded like a tea-kettle on fire. Adding nice little sounds and animations to when tile collisions occurred during gameplay. Also we included some video ads in the game to include a variety of audio and video content into the game, we just thought it’d help add great detail into the game and we wouldn't have to do anything right? That’s so awesome, also someone told us it helps pay bills, so we were like what the heck, let’s do this!
Joke aside *momentarily* we also wanted to do some good and include some educational content in the game because our younger generations should know eggs very well. We recently read this terrible news so we thought it’s just a good socially responsible thing to use this opportunity to educate the players, but something tells us Telegraph has it out for millennials, nevertheless we went with it.
$$$
LET’S TALK BUSINESS
It’s a widely known fact by now that not unlike Karma, Retention is also a b*tch and this is something you realize as you put your baby, or in our case our Eggz, out in the world *pun very much intended*. In the past we have tried our luck with self-publishing but to no outstanding success, it’s not like we don’t think self-publishing doesn’t work even though most of the revenue goes to big-name publishing giants, It’s because that shiz requires major ad $$$ and is frankly speaking a full-time shindig but we’re still trying to figure out how to be a small and beautiful indie team that can navigate the difficult waters of online marketing. For now, we are heading the Publisher route; the idea is to play around with our MVP, refine the parts that suck and push it out to as many potential publishing partners as possible and take it from there one step at a time.
Wish us luck!
Until then, this is it from our side, we’ll keep this corner of the web updated as we move further along our journey so until the next set of terribly written paras, adios!
If you liked our game or have any feedback, give us a shout-out.
If you haven’t played it yet. You can download it here
If you hated this self-denigrating post, then give us a wilder shout-out but either way please do. You know you want to. It’s your destiny.
We will be back!
Written by the self-absorbed bots of Sweet Pixel Studio
* There was a typing mistake, it was supposed to say ‘days’.