Updating an Older Game
Intro
This week, I took a break from Windwalker and spent some time polishing up a minigame I developed last year and released it on the Play Store. I’ll be going over my process in the changes I made to it, and how I managed to limit feature creep and what my goals were in publishing the game. I stripped this minigame from my previous game titled (Dog - Bao Edition). It’s a minigame where you aim your urine stream onto flowers and powerups and try to get a high score. Previously, your goal was to reach a score threshold high enough to unlock the next stage of the game (another minigame), but I needed to find ways to make it a more replayable game for it’s standalone version.
Goals and Scope
- Release game: Get more experience with releasing apps on the Play Store.
- Test Monetization strategies: Banner ads vs interstitial ads, etc.
- Increase Replayability: Add new types of flowers/bugs to spice up the game, and change how game flows.
Increasing Replayability
Previously, the game was fairly replayable and players could work to get higher scores with a high degree of variability. Still, I wanted to increase the degree of variability further. I did this by increasing certain degrees of randomness with spawning entities as well as introducing new features to help with this.
- Clocks: I added clock objects that increase the timer upon killing them.
- Spiders: I created spider objects that crawl across the map and upon killing them the pee stream is upgraded with a flamethrower effect. I gave the spiders flame trails to help the player make better sense of the powerup that follows. I also loved how the addition of these spiders gave a sense of liveliness to the game because prior to them, things weren’t moving as much. Spiders added a different dimension for players to pay attention to.
Adding urgency
My goal was to make the player have a sense of urgency when the timer got closer to 0, so that player’s would be more engaged in the game and try to get higher scores. To do this, I increased the spawn rate when the timer got closer to 0. During this time, the player is more likely to combo destroying flowers and quickly multiply their points.
Future Changes
I’m going to go back to exclusively working on Windwalker now, but I have ideas and notes about many updates/fixes I can make to this game. The following are the main things.
- Balance changes: updating hp values for objects, spawn rates, and powerup damages.
- UI/UX: Due to my personal bias with playing hours of this game, I recognize I don’t have the best judgment when it comes to making UI/UX changes. I’ve consulted with my UX designer partner, but haven’t updated the game to her standard (far from it).
- Optimization: Although the game runs well, I came across some tech debt that was simply outside my scope for the duration I wanted to spend on this project.
Video Demo
