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Last Minute Hero iPhone Game [10 week game with progress shots]

Discussion in 'Made With Unity' started by SquaxShaun, Sep 26, 2010.

  1. SquaxShaun

    SquaxShaun

    Joined:
    Jun 22, 2009
    Posts:
    63
    Hey all,

    I've just recently completed my first iphone game, and it's been quite a ride. Huge thanks to everyone who helped me along the way. I'm in the big Apple submission queue, so twiddling my thumbs and prototyping some ideas while that happens. I thought someone might be interested in the progression of the game over time, so decided to do it in screenshots and videos as I used to take daily caps/videos to track my progress visually :D I used agile/Scrum for development, even though I worked alone on this project, I still find it helps to have some discipline when it comes to project management.


    Week 1 - Workflow setup/Prototyping initial ideas

    Not much to show here visually, mainly just ironing out workflow problems between blender, unity and zbrush. Eliminating risk etc. Also testing beast lightmapping setups, and setting up asset server, svn, dropbox and pivotal tracker management stuff. Prototyped a bunch of ideas on paper and in unity, each taking roughly a few hours to code together, using box and sphere placeholders.


    Week 2 - Prototype development/Character style development
    With the winning prototype chosen, I start playing with ideas for characters. I thought an anime inspired low-poly girl would be cute. During the week, I also fully rigged and animated her in blender, as well as flesh out her texture in zbrush. I'm a programmer by trade, but I like to give the art stuffs a bash.



    Week 3 - Camera and Touch controls

    Worked a lot on developing the initial prototype, so the gameplay felt a little more fun. Decided the 'touch to target' thing worked nicely.



    Week 4 - Enemy Development/OpenFeint Tests

    I wanted a mutant spider theme so decided to work on the enemy concepts a bit. Also integrated OpenFeint into unity 3 beta, but after some user testing, it felt really unresponsive on the 3g hardware. Made the call, to roll my own leaderboards and provide achievements as a Game Center update later.



    Week 5 - Environment Creation

    I wanted the environment to be based in Tokyo, so I chose Shibuya Crossing as my reference and modelled and textured a very low poly version of it. I baked in all the lighting details using beast. Also started messing around with different lighting textures on the character and enemies. StarCraft II also launched this week, productivity down ;_;



    Week 6 - Initial GUI and Gameplay Flow

    Not much to show this week, just a lot of background support code, initial gui test for player controls. Worked on some graphical blood effects as well, but not too happy with them. The new Unity beta (b6 I think) release was causing me some grief this week regarding audio crashing on device, but I submitted some bug reports and soldiered on.



    Week 7 - Gameplay Flow

    Continued to work on the game flow, and visual style and started to think about the game as a whole, from title to ending. It was intended for the game to be a bit of a 5 minute time waster, so I wanted to keep the flow really simple.



    Week 8 - UI and Weapon Selection

    More UI stuff, and also completed the 5 different weapons that will be in the game, as well as all their graphical effects. Also started on a second pass pollish on the placeholder gui. Messing around with some cheap hair physics.



    Week 9 - Sound Effects, Graphical Effects, Fake Lighting, Leaderboards, Logo design and UX

    It's pretty strange, but I got so carried away with implementing everything I forgot to take a daily screenshot. I signed up to ibetatest.com which worked out nicely for finding testers. Also added some quick tutorial stuff for new players. I did manage to take a video to capture the state before the beta though. Also licensed a great chiptune from Sabrepulse to use in the game.



    Week 10 - Beta Feedback and Additional Pollish

    Got some great feedback from everyone who played it, I'm not a fan of positive feedback, unless it's of the general sort, so some of the negative stuff was like golddust for me. Hopefully my changes I implemented because of it are for the better. :D These changes included texture changes, gameplay speed changes and a little improvement in the flow and a few ux fixes, like bigger controls. Also managed to get my mits on an iphone4 and ipod touch 3rd gen, so finally able to implement image effects on supported devices - ace!



    Submission Day - Marketing material and some 'last minute' additions \o/

    Noob-tip: make sure you actually finish your game before you start making marketing material like videos etc. I forgot to add the moon prop, and also bake shadows into my environment so I had to basically do the same task twice XD Finally submitted Last Minute Hero after some final device compatibility testing at 4:30am hurrah \o/ Here's the old promo video I quickly through together the other day, still compositing the newer one as it takes half a day on my antique laptop, with the updated gameplay footage.



    Looking forward to my next project using Unity :D
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2010
  2. puppeteer

    puppeteer

    Joined:
    Sep 15, 2010
    Posts:
    1,282
    "Week 5: ...StarCraft II also launched this week, productivity down ;_;", haha that's just so true! It's hard to be a Gamer and a Developer at the same time :D

    That's an awesome progress you made in such a short time, hope you get it up on iTunes asap. Can you tell me more about the agile scrum method you used? How exactly did you divide up your time between ideas/graphics/coding?

    I'm doing a game right now too, been only 6 days into development (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/60877-Swift-s-Journey-WIP-DAY5) and already it's starting to get complicated with so many ideas scattered in an Excel sheet.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2010
  3. crafTDev

    crafTDev

    Joined:
    Nov 5, 2008
    Posts:
    1,820
    Wonderful!! Still amazes me that you did this in such a short time. Testing it was great. Just let me know when it hits the appstore so I could support it.
     
  4. SquaxShaun

    SquaxShaun

    Joined:
    Jun 22, 2009
    Posts:
    63
    Thanks, this is day 9 of sitting in Apple's review queue. :D

    @Puppeteer Looks like you are making excellent progress with your game. I usually do all my idea generating/day planning when I'm taking a shower in the morning, then I update pivotal tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/) to keep track of my previous tasks and to add new ones if I have thought of any. I don't usually follow any formal design doc for short games, usually just a notebook with a few concept sketches. I tend to spend a large chunk of time upfront working on gameplay prototypes, working out potential pipeline problems and minimising risk that any of my ideas might introduce, basically just testing if ideas are feasible before committing. I try not to split tasks into art/coding etc, and view them more as a whole. For the bigger tasks though, I tend to time box them. I usually do a first pass on the art stuffs (modelled, animated and unwrapped with a baked ambient occlusion texture), just to get them into the game quicker, where I can then go back to them at a later date to finish them off. I try to always aim to have a playable build of the game, this seems to minimise bugs, if you are continuously play-testing while you integrate changes.

    The only thing I didn't do for this project was the idea of the architecture runway for the gui screens, next time I'll probably do this upfront rather than try to retrofit onto an existing prototype, will save a heap of time.


    Edit: Forgot to mention, I initially planned this to be an 8 week project, broken up into 4 2-week long sprints, but ended up needing an additional sprint for public beta testing and final touches.
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2010
  5. Persona

    Persona

    Joined:
    Jul 25, 2010
    Posts:
    280
    Making a game like this in less than 3 months is impressive alright.
     
  6. okimoki

    okimoki

    Joined:
    May 13, 2010
    Posts:
    116