Juice It! | 2019 (1 week)
Hyper-casual game (iOS and Android)
Themes: juice | fresh
Pitch: The smoothest app you’ve always wanted is here!
Fill glass shapes with sweet juices!
Game Design | Level Design
Unity | Miro
Ipad Gameplay
Brief
During my master's 1 at Supinfogame - Rubika, my batch had a workshop with Voodoo, the biggest game developer and publisher for free-to-play mobile games.
We had to learn about a new kind of audience: the hyper-casual players. On the first week, I gathered with a team of 5 people and we worked on Bodyguard, a game where your goal is to protect a superstar from Paparazzis.
First week: Bodyguard
Holding the finger anywhere on the screen creates a virtual stick giving control of the bodyguard's movement.
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Touching paparazzis kick them away
Although well-received by the Voodoo team and the school, our team felt like the scope was too big for one week, since we had to deal with AIs, 3D modeling, animations and heavy optimization, leaving us with very little time to balance and polish the game. Furthermore, the virtual stick controller and the scrolling camera were sometimes hard for hyper-casual playtesters to understand.
Second week: Juice It!
Pressing anywhere on the screen raises the juice.
The rising speed depends on the current width of the cup!
When coins fill up the bar to its maximum, the player gets a new glass shape and difficulty is increased for the next levels.
Too much limit
Perfect limit
Ok limit
Therefore, we came with a rather simpler and more effective concept for the second week: your goal as a player is to fill up each glass as much as you can, without making the glass overflow!
This new concept allowed us to make more content and polish far more visual and sensorial features than Bodyguard.
Documentation
In order to work more effectively, we had to find a new way of documenting our design, because hypercasual games need a lot of fine-tuning and using powerpoint, word, or confluence is too heavy for a one week development, but on the other hand, we had to have a clear vision of the game.
After seeing our artists gathering references on Miro, we found out that using it for basic game design documentation was a perfect fit. It allowed us to very quickly document, communicate and explain Juice It!'s gameplay to the other members of the team, even though the most precise parameters were directly tweaked and designed in Unity.
Other team members:
Outcome
Both Bodyguard and Juice It! were selected by Voodoo to make a test on the US app store. Adds showcasing both projects' gameplay videos were shown on Facebook. If an iOS user client clicked on the video, he would was given a link to download the game on the app store. It is why our team also had to give various pitches and screenshots to make sure the game was as attractive as possible.
Juice It! reached a score of 0.80$ cost per install, which is a good rate for a test but still too much to continue the game with Voodoo. This project remains up to date a very interesting experience, because it taught me how to deal with non-gamers, simplifying game design as much as possible, and cutting anything wasn't necessary for production.
Other team members:
Jim Cador | Game Designer
Jules Duvette | Programmer
Valentin Lamérand | Game Artist
Amélie Rivière | Game Artist