We run four “Studies” a year that challenge our team members to learn new skills, tools and processes together. This quarter’s study was focused on the Infinite Runner game genre, as made popular by Canabalt and Temple Run.
GOALS
We focused on:
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- Learning the MoreMountains Infinite Runner Engine – this awesome asset package has a slew of infinite runner games ready to modify. This was a great way for us to spend time creating unique mechanics and visuals instead of re-inventing the wheel.
- Writing Game Design Documents. We started by reading ‘A Game Design Grammar‘ and writing really simple outlines covering our Story, Mechanics, Nouns & Verbs, Scoring, and Interaction Table.
| Run Into | Jump Over | Attack | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short Wall | Player loses health. | Player’s score increases. | – |
| Enemy | Player is attacked and loses health. | Player is attacked and loses health. | Enemy is destroyed, player score increases. |
| Coin | Player’s score increases. | – | Coin is destroyed. |
- Pitching and iterating on our Game Mechanics as a team before moving them too far into production.
- Using Leaderbird, our in-house tool for easy Global leaderboards.
- Using Git Forks to work on many sub-games that could be merged back into one master game! This was a challenge but turned out great. Everyone started with a fork of the main project and built their game within their fork. They would then submit pull requests to the upstream branch in order to make the master game, where you can switch between all the games like levels in a typical Infinite Runner.
- Using Git LFS and Submodules to manage our binary art assets – super important since we all had lots of binary assets and may have tripped BitBucket’s repo size limits otherwise.
THE GAMES
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- Duality: This minimalist game inspired by the concept of partnership challenges you to let go, trade places, and come together at the right moments.
- Duality: This minimalist game inspired by the concept of partnership challenges you to let go, trade places, and come together at the right moments.
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- Yardage: Sprint through backyards, hopping over and busting through obstacles in this action-movie inspired finger-fury challenge.
- Yardage: Sprint through backyards, hopping over and busting through obstacles in this action-movie inspired finger-fury challenge.
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- Human Tetris: The player must bend their body into different shapes to fit through holes in walls that slide towards them at an increasing speed!
- Human Tetris: The player must bend their body into different shapes to fit through holes in walls that slide towards them at an increasing speed!
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- Songbird: Navigating the open skies and avoid obstacles through the use of your voice.
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- Songbird: Navigating the open skies and avoid obstacles through the use of your voice.
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- Existential Runner: Don’t let the void consume you! Choose when to reproduce, and run forever through your children!
- Existential Runner: Don’t let the void consume you! Choose when to reproduce, and run forever through your children!
We had a great time making these games, and are currently working on making some custom Infinite Running games for our clients! We will share the results when the games are finished.
Interested in learning more about our work with branded gaming or our upcoming internal studies? Drop us a line at info@heliosinteractive.com.