Summary
As an experimental and crazy idea, we came up with the possibility of building a smartphone videogame based on one of the history classics. My job was focused in the technical area, to reduce friction of the project’s complexity finding creative solutions to the challenges we were self imposing. Communication, exigency and little time ahead, we decided to build our first videogame.
My work includes, influence over visual style, usability and player’s interaction design as well as 100% of the code.
Get “Apocalipsis” game on Google Play
The project
We then decided that since it was our first game, it should have the broadest public as possible, genderless, and as much as we could “ageless” as well.
With those ideas in mind, and knowing that we won’t be able to do a proper research, we dove deep into the gaming market, statistics, articles and other professional studies (that we wouldn’t had the time to do). Then we did a small brainstorming session and ended up with a few ideas. Finally after careful consideration, we started to work on our final bet, an arcade game based on the simple idea of “pong” the 1972 game from Atari.
Prototypes
We decided to give a twist to the Pong idea, making it a one-player game, with the only objective of defending it’s goal. We put the Earth as goal and asteroids as balls. We began with the idea of working in a portrait mode, and throwing some asteroids to the player.
Our first prototypes were shown to a small amount of users, and then we soon realized that portrait mode, was too narrow to play as we wanted.
We continued to evolve and test as often as we could. Getting feedback from the testers and evaluating it’s priority within the project.
Result
Lessons learnt
User feedback is key, without it, our little experiment would have been much worse. We had the chance of having a small but highly motivated set of testers that provided quality feedback on every step.
With all this information and the effort put into work we released a better game within time.
The team
Developed at Reo Developer, Tarragona.
- UX Designer – Adrià Pérez Pla
- Android UX Developer – Eloi Navarro Serrano