Going out of my comfort zone

Invoke was a project I was hired to work on during my free time on the weekends within the span of 3 months.

In the meantime I was also talking with Osman Tsjardiwal (formerly of Epic Games, Guerrilla Games and Splash Damage) about a possible future project. Most of it is under NDA, but these are some sketches of the ideas I had about his game Panzer, which I can share:

Since the game had to run smoothly on mid range mobile devices I picked Unity for this project.

About 1 month before the deadline a programmer and a UI designer joined. Having a programmer work so closely with me on scripts thought me a lot on naming conventions, structuring my code (both for better performance and readability) and use of proper technical language to improve our communication.

The prototype

I started with a simple game mode where the objective is to drag the boxes at the 2 slots in the bottom middle and calculate their sum. This is simple math for 1st graders and the addends are represented by objects.

Next step was something more complicated. Finding the difference of 2 3-digit numbers. I looked at how schools teach math and recreated that so children can use the game as a tool to solve problems easier and faster. During playtests they used this functionality.

Since I didn’t want the correct results to be negative numbers I made this formula.

This is the state at which I got to by myself. The problems could be solved only with a correct answer, which would spawn the “boom” particle to indicate the enemy being damaged. The numbers are simple 3D models I made in Maya.

This is the prototype before the deadline. The UI, timer and health bars were implemented by the programmer. I could finally spend time on set dressing a new scene, adding basic lighting, adding and adjusting some particles and creating an animation state machine.

After 30 minutes of research I was able to understand how animations are set up in Unity.

Personal outcome

It was a challenge that felt quite outside of my comfort zone. Being a solo developer for an educational mobile fighting game targeted at children (7–11 year old) was something I never imagined I would work on.

For the majority of the project I felt like a solo indie dev who had to do a little bit of everything, which got a little overwhelming. At the same time seeing all the progress was quite rewarding.

By the end of the project I had written about 1 000 lines of C# code, none of which were in the Update method.

Project outcome

So far two publishers have approached the owner of the company with offers for further development of the game.