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Title: Box-A-Mote
Release: September 2017
Development Period: 1 Month
Development Status: Completed
Availability: Android™ Devices, PC
Tagline: Unbox a Mote!
Release: September 2017
Development Period: 1 Month
Development Status: Completed
Availability: Android™ Devices, PC
Tagline: Unbox a Mote!
What an undertaking this project ended up being! I knew what I was in for simply by having an idea of the sheer number of emotes between all of the content creators I wanted to include in the initial release. The idea was originally brought up by MathasGames on an episode of the Roundtable Podcast (the exact episode unfortunately has escaped me) and later by RockLeeSmile on an episode of the NLSS. I planned the release of Box-A-Mote to coincide with the 100th episode of the Roundtable Podcast as well!
Opening loot chests to find out what goodies are inside is almost always exciting just because something is at risk and there's usually a bunch of flashy lights and visuals to really make the moment feel special. While the original premise was simply "a game about opening boxes and getting emotes" I took it a step further as I did with Garbage Bird and tried to make it at least somewhat entertaining. From the beginning I knew I wasn't going to put any real micro-transactions as that would've defeated the idea of the parody (it also would've been improper of me to do so), and had planned to have something called the "Salt Mines" where you would tap on rocks to gather salt then use the salt to craft boxes then open those. I immediately realised how terrible of an idea that was even if it was at the expense of a joke. A breakout style game where by breaking blocks you collect the salt that falls out of them might even still be added in the future.
So instead of a mining minigame, why not just have several games? If there are several games, what is the overarching currency that would be used to between them that would also be used to get boxes? Coins! ...SALT Coins! And yes, SALT actually stands for something: Super Amazing Leisure Time. Not exactly the best acronym, in fact I was really struggling to find something for "L" but hey it works.
The games themselves are admittedly uninspired and but this is mostly because I wanted to make sure the app was released before my self imposed due date. Core Mini is a recreation of Concept Core, but instead of taking several months to create the game mechanics, it only took a couple of hours. Circle Popper is literally just a fast reaction game.
Opening loot chests to find out what goodies are inside is almost always exciting just because something is at risk and there's usually a bunch of flashy lights and visuals to really make the moment feel special. While the original premise was simply "a game about opening boxes and getting emotes" I took it a step further as I did with Garbage Bird and tried to make it at least somewhat entertaining. From the beginning I knew I wasn't going to put any real micro-transactions as that would've defeated the idea of the parody (it also would've been improper of me to do so), and had planned to have something called the "Salt Mines" where you would tap on rocks to gather salt then use the salt to craft boxes then open those. I immediately realised how terrible of an idea that was even if it was at the expense of a joke. A breakout style game where by breaking blocks you collect the salt that falls out of them might even still be added in the future.
So instead of a mining minigame, why not just have several games? If there are several games, what is the overarching currency that would be used to between them that would also be used to get boxes? Coins! ...SALT Coins! And yes, SALT actually stands for something: Super Amazing Leisure Time. Not exactly the best acronym, in fact I was really struggling to find something for "L" but hey it works.
The games themselves are admittedly uninspired and but this is mostly because I wanted to make sure the app was released before my self imposed due date. Core Mini is a recreation of Concept Core, but instead of taking several months to create the game mechanics, it only took a couple of hours. Circle Popper is literally just a fast reaction game.
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The actual back-end means of sorting is unfortunately not optimized primarily because I'm not able to use the vastly superior "merge sort" algorithm over "insertion sort" due to the fact that the engine I used for the project (GameMaker Studio) doesn't play very nicely with recursive methods and I ran into memory problems about 7 method calls in. Other users have run into this problem so regrettably an O(n^2) will have to do.
On the brightside, data management was handled entirely in a formatted LibreOffice Calc page. All of the values for the emote names, their rarities, and number were all input grid by grid then copy and pasted into my code. Obviously managing the 200+ long list of numbers, variables names, and strings isn't very plausible in an IDE so I'm glad that I've really embraced the powers of a simple spreadsheet.
Seeing all of the emotes displayed in the collection screen for the first time was frankly cathartic considering the amount of work I had to do to get everything together. Hopefully someone out there has the determination to collect all of the emotes as that would really be a sight to behold. I could just mess with my save file to achieve the same effect but that's no fun.
Hopefully the completion of this project means I can more comfortably work on large masses of other in game items like weapons with a similar approach. Maybe revisit some of the my older ideas and see what can be improved...
On the brightside, data management was handled entirely in a formatted LibreOffice Calc page. All of the values for the emote names, their rarities, and number were all input grid by grid then copy and pasted into my code. Obviously managing the 200+ long list of numbers, variables names, and strings isn't very plausible in an IDE so I'm glad that I've really embraced the powers of a simple spreadsheet.
Seeing all of the emotes displayed in the collection screen for the first time was frankly cathartic considering the amount of work I had to do to get everything together. Hopefully someone out there has the determination to collect all of the emotes as that would really be a sight to behold. I could just mess with my save file to achieve the same effect but that's no fun.
Hopefully the completion of this project means I can more comfortably work on large masses of other in game items like weapons with a similar approach. Maybe revisit some of the my older ideas and see what can be improved...
Last Update: 09/15/2017