Post about how I sculpted the game, from plasticine

Good day to all! I decided to tell the world the story of the creation of my first mobile game. I did it hourly a day for almost a year and a half.

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I play games only on the phone, and mainly in time killers, when an inapplicable period of time is formed. Based on their own preferences, the platform and genre were determined. It was decided to make a 2D wall-to-wall strategy with fairly short levels. Slavic fairy tales were chosen as a setting, but a sick fantasy made its own adjustments. It was decided to make the game on Unity, since I am familiar with C # quite well.

Throughout the development, the most difficult part for me was the visual part. I do not know how to draw and do not like. I did not want to spend money on art. In general, I decided to make a game out of plasticine. In childhood, much time was devoted to this hobby. And I always really liked the Soviet plasticine cartoons. Inspired by them, I started sculpting.

It soon became clear that doing frame-by-frame plasticine animation is simply “hellish hell”. The figures retain the pose for only a few seconds, then the pose begins to float. I tried to make a wire frame, but even this did not give the desired result.

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The wire came across either too hard or too brittle. After tormenting myself for two weeks and not getting an acceptable result, I decided to change the approach. This time I blinded the body parts of the characters separately and sanitized using the engine.
Here are the following guys:

  • Peasant
    Peasant
  • Bombshell cucumber
    Bombshell cucumber
  • Overripe Snakebird
    Overripe Snakebird
  • Horseradish
    Horseradish


For animation, I originally planned to use a plugin for inverse kinematics. But, subsequently, I had to abandon it, because when animating a large number of units, and at later levels there are up to 500 at the same time, he had a significant impact on performance. As a result, the animation had to be implemented only by the engine. Fortunately, it turned out to be more than enough for my needs. Having finished with this, I decided that it was already at the finish line. After all, there was only balancing. How wrong I was ...

Having finished with the animation, I figured out the balance on my knee and published the closed alpha on Google Play, giving access to friends and colleagues. It turned out that there is no balance at all. The algorithm for generating opponents was prohibitively random. That level was simply impossible to pass, then it was passed without any effort at all. Then I decided to get rid of the randomness, and balance each level manually. Having made the first several levels in this way, I realized that this work will take too much time, and the approach must be changed. After spending a couple of days to develop a deterministic algorithm for generating opponents, I got an acceptable result. It remains to determine the input parameters for each of the 99 levels. Before I managed to finish this, I went through my game once more 30, simultaneously adjusting the prices of downloads, the characteristics of the player’s units, and enemy units. My friends and colleagues helped me a lot in testing. Some of them played the game for several months, and during that time they gave me a huge amount of feedback.

That’s all for me. I will be glad to hear criticism. Of course, I hope for a constructive.

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