Title: Concept Core
Release: June 2016
Initial Development Period: 3-4 Months
Development Status: Completed
Availability: Android™ Devices
Tagline: Tap. Score. Win.
Release: June 2016
Initial Development Period: 3-4 Months
Development Status: Completed
Availability: Android™ Devices
Tagline: Tap. Score. Win.
Concept Core is the first game I planned on releasing from the beginning of its design. I tried to be as forward thinking as possible making a generic umbrella series name being "Concept." Concept encapsulated the idea that these games are mostly proof-of-concepts for ideas that could be expanded upon.
Concept Core is a simple match game that was actually inspired by the old Atari Jaguar game Tempest 2000. After realising the game's 3D perspective would be too challenging for me at the time, I settled for 2D. The primary mechanic of the game is to tap the core in the center, matching its color to one of the nodes surrounding it, and tapping the node before it fills up with its color. If a node fills completely, the player loses a hit point and when the player loses all of them the game ends. There are also 1-up rockets that can be tapped for additional hit points and rockets must be removed by changing the core's color to grey.
The gameplay loop was satisfying, however there were some important lessons I learned from this:
1. Menus MUST BE SIMPLE
There are SO MANY sub-menus and some of them even has similar names that it was confusing for people to navigate.
2. Scale GUI
This should've been obvious, but I didn't test some of the elements on larger screens and resolutions. In fact the logo was originally made in 128 x 128, but then I had to scale it up to 512 x 512.
3. Keep the Game Accessible
There are multiple difficulty settings and they all have different difficulty ceilings making them inconsistent. The idea was to balance them by earning more points at higher difficulties. The most intuitive solution really would've been to just have one difficulty and use a much smoother difficulty curve.
For what it's worth this was also developed during my freshman year of college which is why the development time was much longer than I feel it needed to be and why not everything ended up as polished as I'd like. I look back on this with a bit of shame because of how poorly polished a lot of is and at some point I hope to go back and fine tune everything. However, I'm to have taken this first step despite all of its flaws, as I think future projects will and have benefited from it greatly.
Concept Core is a simple match game that was actually inspired by the old Atari Jaguar game Tempest 2000. After realising the game's 3D perspective would be too challenging for me at the time, I settled for 2D. The primary mechanic of the game is to tap the core in the center, matching its color to one of the nodes surrounding it, and tapping the node before it fills up with its color. If a node fills completely, the player loses a hit point and when the player loses all of them the game ends. There are also 1-up rockets that can be tapped for additional hit points and rockets must be removed by changing the core's color to grey.
The gameplay loop was satisfying, however there were some important lessons I learned from this:
1. Menus MUST BE SIMPLE
There are SO MANY sub-menus and some of them even has similar names that it was confusing for people to navigate.
2. Scale GUI
This should've been obvious, but I didn't test some of the elements on larger screens and resolutions. In fact the logo was originally made in 128 x 128, but then I had to scale it up to 512 x 512.
3. Keep the Game Accessible
There are multiple difficulty settings and they all have different difficulty ceilings making them inconsistent. The idea was to balance them by earning more points at higher difficulties. The most intuitive solution really would've been to just have one difficulty and use a much smoother difficulty curve.
For what it's worth this was also developed during my freshman year of college which is why the development time was much longer than I feel it needed to be and why not everything ended up as polished as I'd like. I look back on this with a bit of shame because of how poorly polished a lot of is and at some point I hope to go back and fine tune everything. However, I'm to have taken this first step despite all of its flaws, as I think future projects will and have benefited from it greatly.
Last Update: 07/05/2017