Tamagogo: The Great Eggscape!
Hatching Our First Game
Ingenuity’s first take in Game Development, Tamagogo is a casual stealth and strategy game with a one-touch control mechanism which makes it easier to navigate a simple plot: escape a terrain of moving hazards, including roving guards, while helping a monster (the game’s hero) rescue and hatch its eggs.
Unexpectedly, Tamagogo was given major awards by the Game Developers Association of the Philippines (GDAP) at the 2016 GameOn! ICT Creatives Awards Night paving the way for more game development in Ingenuity’s bright future.
The Project
The project is a casual, arcade video game designed for commute, pick up and play.
What is the Project About
Tamagogo is about monsters who save their eggs from the heroes who have invaded their home.
Project Demand
Tamagogo was made using Unity and C# scripting to deploy the games in the IOS and Android platforms. The project utilized plugins such as: Pathfinder for the character pathfinding in 2D space, Nodecanvas for the AI, and IsoTools for the isometric sorting.
Resolution
Tamagogo required to be deployed in multiple platforms so Unity was the engine to be used since it deploys to multiple platforms with only single coding and minimal optimizations per target platform. For the gameplay side, Tamagogo required AI for the enemies so we resolved this using Nodecanvas which is a tool to make Behaviour Trees and State Machines easily, then Pathfinder for the enemy movement; a plugin that makes A* pathfinding easier. Then, we integrated Pathfinder into Nodecanvas to be used by the AI. For the art side of the game, we wanted an isometric look for the game using 2D assets. Since, isometric is faked 3D and required sorting of layers of 2D sprites, we opt using Isotools which is a plugin that auto manages 2D sorting for isometric art styled games. The rest of the features in the game uses proprietary code using the Unity API.
Project Duration
A total of 5 months was spent for the project, from March 2016 — July 2016. After the project implementation, we are now on a Support, maintenance and marketing for the game.
Conclusion
Making the game was challenging since it was our first time making a game as a team and also a first for the artist. We were also using gameplay that’s never done before, so it took longer to find the fun and iterate on the gameplay. Also, it took a while to learn the plugins since it was the first time we have used them. But overall, it was a fun project with lots of lessons for us as a team.
