Hello, and welcome to my devlog where I will be documenting my journey in developing my first game, Insanity.
Insanity is a mobile 2D platformer game that is inspired by a game called Super Meat Boy. I am planning to publish it to the play and app stores by the end of 2020. At the beginning I had no idea what game I should be doing. I downloaded some free assets from the asset store and tried to build my own Third Person Controller, then I tried to animate that character and play around with it, but I didn’t really have a solid idea that I can work on from the beginning and take it all the way to release. At that time I was playing Super Meat Boy, and i thought… why not start with something similar to it. 2D and 3D Development are pretty much the same with few differences as per my knowledge with Unity so far. So I decided to start with developing a 2D Platformer game similar to Super Meat Boy but for mobile.
I developed my first level in that game and experimented with the character controller to try to make the player move. Thanks to the course “The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Game Development” that Jonathan Weinberger offered on Unity, I got familiar with tilemaps and with the basics of level design for mobile games, and this is where it all started. I had my notebook with me all the time to write down any idea that I may have for that game. The game is supposed to challenge the player where he/she has to go through multiple levels with obstacles and traps and make it all the way to collect the sacred gem in each level. When I first thought about Insanity, I thought that it should include the following:
- Lots of traps that the player has to overcome.
- Power ups that can help the player overcome some complex traps easily. The power ups that I thought about so far are an ability to dash and freeze time for the environment.
- The game should give the player a feeling of having to push forward. So the over all atmosphere of the game is drive the player forward to try and pass all the levels.
- The music should convey that feeling to the player. For now I am using as a pilot the soundtrack of Halo. I still need to work on its soundtracks, but this will do for now.
When you unlock all the levels the game will unload a mode called “Insanity Mode” where the player is challenged to finish the whole game in a single run. No checkpoints, no lives, no mercy. If the player dies, he/she has to start the game all over from the beginning. I am not sure yet if this is a good idea to make or not, but I guess things will be clearer towards the end of development.
One of the challenges that I have when developing this game is the art. When it comes to art, and designing good looking environments and animations I am not that skilled, so i tried as much as I can to get myself comfortable with Photoshop. I also found a great website where you can file some really good tilesets that you can use in your 2D game. The website is www.freepik.com you can find a lot of good sprites over there.
I am also using Unity Advertisements to play ads to the player. I will be talking more about the my approach towards the ads in later posts.
So far I have built only 4 levels, and I keep on expanding on the game’s features. Once I finish all the features that I have planned, I will continue on creating more levels.
