5: Developing our First Playable Prototype

Game: Coral Catastrophe
Programmer: Devin Gonzales
Artist: Daniel Balducci

At the end of the day, the only way to understand game development is to begin development of your own. Acting as our programmer and paired with an artist, we were prepared to build our own small endless-runner title in Unity. We wanted something replayable, fun, simple and easily portable to mobile and one of the first titles we drew inspiration from in these regards was the unforgettable Flappy Bird. We set out to put our spin on this simple runner with a fish instead of a bird. The idea was to have the player swim towards the end while avoiding an AI shark, with the goal of gaining the highest score. I set out to begin writing the game mechanics while my artists began work on the assets.

It turns out the process to develop even a small game is a little more difficult than you might think. Surprisingly enough a lot of my trouble was not with the code but with the Unity editor itself. I began with the simple mechanics such as the physics of the swimming fish and moved my way upwards towards the more complex components of the game. Of these, the script that ran the parallax movement was the most difficult. Some time after I begin writing it I was in a war with bugs that made Starship Troopers look benign. With a little elbow grease and several cups of coffee, the first playable prototype was in sight.

Once the code was written and the art was imported, it was time to tweak the game mechanics. A big part of designing our mechanics was centered around difficulty and ensuring the player had a good time playing the game while also not growing bored. I ensured the collision-box for our fish hugged the sprite as closely as possible but also left some generous room for mistakes. Next up was adjusting the velocity of obstacles moving “towards” our fish, such that the player isn’t bombarded with a series of obstacles that require super-human reactions to win. At long last with our art in place, mechanics created and adjusted, our first playable prototype was ready to go for testing.

Players reacted well and definitely picked up on our inspiration. I was really surprised by some of the they caught that, while obvious in hindsight, didn’t cross our minds in development. Many players caught onto the fact that they could swim out of bounds vertically. Some also suggested many ideas we have planned, such as steadily increasing difficulty and inclusion of audio/sound effects. All in all we are excited to continue development on this title after this feedback and hopefully get a working version for Android and iOS!