Electra-fish are evil!
Disclaimer: I am not repsonsible nor do I claim responsibility for ANY of the gorgeous artistic visuals on display in this game . They are all the product of the magnificent artists I have the pleasure of working with at Fuel .
You can Get ThunderJack Here (iOS):
......or Here ( Amazon):
Thunder Jack was featured on GooglePlay from September 17th to Sepetember 24th and we recieved over 45,000 Downloads during that period !!!!!
Above is a trailer for the latest project released by my team at Fuel, Thunder Jack's LogRunner! Thunder Jack's Log Runner is a 2D Infinite runner Available on iOS, Android, Windows, and Amazon devices that was developed i nthe Unity 3D engine . I had the pleasure of being able to lead the charge on prototyping the initial concept, and this is the first game I have had the priviledge of working on at the gameplay level so early on and seeing it all the way through to its release . It's been incredible seeing how the game has evolved over time and has included several major revisions before release.
I am going to go over all the Areas and susb-systems I was in charge of but I think this video gives a solid idea of the core Gameplay of ThunderJAck . I was responsible for several sub-systems including the above the water mechanics such as coin collection , the feeling of our "Zone" Collectibles, the Notification / acheivement system when completing objectives and the Reward Bird among a few others. I also recieved the opportunity to play a big part in porting our game to Android and my Lead Programmer even let me pushed the Publish / Release button on our Android Launch day ! I am really proud with the work I was able to do and placed in charge of for Thunder Jack and I hope people enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed Developing it.
The coin collectible system was exciting for me to work on because I am a lover of old school 2D platformers so Mario , Sonic, Vector man , Eathworm Jim , I mean for hundreds of platformers collection is a core game mechanic and this is the first Platformer - type game I have worked on where I was in charge of the collectible system . The Moose coins themselves come in denominations of singles, 5's, and 10's..
This was also the firstp roject I have worked on where we had a Game Designer I truly trust and where I had to extend the system enough for him to make basic prefabs for different Coin Arrangements/ Formations . Our Designer would create a prefab of coins and I created a system that would randomly spawn one of said coin prefabs at a certain rate . this was one of the first major additions we included when looking to add a sense of progression and challenge player skill to our game. . the goal of both balancing and acquiring the most coins
This was also the firstp roject I have worked on where we had a Game Designer I truly trust and where I had to extend the system enough for him to make basic prefabs for different Coin Arrangements/ Formations . Our Designer would create a prefab of coins and I created a system that would randomly spawn one of said coin prefabs at a certain rate . this was one of the first major additions we included when looking to add a sense of progression and challenge player skill to our game. . the goal of both balancing and acquiring the most coins
While the coins themselves were pretty standard, the zones took a little more time for me to understand and appreciate conceptually . They are more or less reward areas which you have to stand in for a certain duration and upon filling them completely they reward a certain amount of coins . I had a lot of fun owning the Zones too I have to say , we have a nice manager in editor with different " Zone Profiles" Which list the zone, the angle range in which they may spawn, the amount of coins they reward, and how long it takes to fill them up .
You can tell the zones reward / difficulty of filling by looking at what color they are and then compound that with whether they move or not , a gree static zone is worth less than a green moving zone and so on and so forth .
You can tell the zones reward / difficulty of filling by looking at what color they are and then compound that with whether they move or not , a gree static zone is worth less than a green moving zone and so on and so forth .
Throughout my career so far I have truly cherished those " EUREKA!" moments where I implement or come to understand a system used in my favorite games . The notification system was one such moment that I relished while working on TJLR . The notification itself is simple, we have an otification manager , and when something happens we call it and submit a notification type and description however the eureka moment came in writing the queing system for notifications so that theoretically you could recieve 100 notifications at once and have it display each notification one at a time and even if new notofications are created they jsut get added to the end of the Qeue .
For me learning how to implemenet such a system was very exciting and it is definitely knowledge I am sure I will be able to use in the future on many more projects and be able to feel confident about doing so .
For me learning how to implemenet such a system was very exciting and it is definitely knowledge I am sure I will be able to use in the future on many more projects and be able to feel confident about doing so .
Personally I love prime 31 and the tools that development team has provided to the unity community, we use his Toolset in TJLR and extend it to both submit and retrieve scores from users and their friends . MY awesome LEad Programmer for this project did the visual placement of the avatars and scores on the map but I was in charge of both submitting and retrieving the friends data in code and sending it to him nice , clean, and sorted so that the job of placing the objects visually was easier .
Here you see your current progres / meters traveled on the river and on the sides you can see my friends and there progress on the river in their games as well . This was one of my first forays into social gaming and I really enjoyed seeing it come to fruition .
Here you see your current progres / meters traveled on the river and on the sides you can see my friends and there progress on the river in their games as well . This was one of my first forays into social gaming and I really enjoyed seeing it come to fruition .
More fun with Facebook Sharing , pretty ismple implementation , posting the users score to facebook to share with friends.
As a team we have been really working on promoting user engagement in our currrent and upcoming games , one such tool that has allowed us to do that is Everyplay which is an in-game screen capture tool which allows you to share games with a large mobile gaming / video sharing community but also allows you to easily share recordings of your gameplay on multiple social networks.
One of my other roles was integrating Everyplay into our game and making sure I made the recording experience as seamless and consistent as possible so that we only recorded gameplay and not any down time . Unfortunately due to performance issues on lower end Android devices we had to limit our everyplay integration to iOS devices only but we have been very happy with the way it performs on the devices we have enabled support on.
One of my other roles was integrating Everyplay into our game and making sure I made the recording experience as seamless and consistent as possible so that we only recorded gameplay and not any down time . Unfortunately due to performance issues on lower end Android devices we had to limit our everyplay integration to iOS devices only but we have been very happy with the way it performs on the devices we have enabled support on.
One of our final implementations and my baby so to speak was the reward bird , it was kind of a simple pie in the sky , wouldn't it be nice implementation and thankfully we got it in . Our reward owl shows up randomly at a random nterval and carries a package that users have to tap and then collect by touching it with Thunder Jack or Thunder Jane before it hits the water. His packages can contain coins in multiple durations as well as our premium currency which is fish bucks .
I think he is a fun addition and since he only stays on screen for a while it can be challenge to both avoid obstacles and rotate at the right angle to retrieve whatever goodies he is carrying .
The reward bird was the first itme I really had dealt with giving our designer an editor tool to create a " Loot Pool" so to speak . a pool of rewardable resources that could be retrieved by the player and probability of retrieving a given reward in a specific mode. it was very cool and an Ide I took from our Lead programmers implementation in other places in the game and refactored here.
I think he is a fun addition and since he only stays on screen for a while it can be challenge to both avoid obstacles and rotate at the right angle to retrieve whatever goodies he is carrying .
The reward bird was the first itme I really had dealt with giving our designer an editor tool to create a " Loot Pool" so to speak . a pool of rewardable resources that could be retrieved by the player and probability of retrieving a given reward in a specific mode. it was very cool and an Ide I took from our Lead programmers implementation in other places in the game and refactored here.
The bonsu runs are extra unlockable areas that you can visit and get a lot of coins from very quickly and made to be quick cash-grabs so to speak ..The one visual aspect I had control over in the game that I really enjoyed was being able to create the Coin Reward Prefabs in the Bonus Runs . I am a pretty simple guy most of the time and being able to work on this feature has definitely reminded me of some of my favorite gaming memories such as flying above the clouds in several mario bros. games and the fun of just running and collecting a high volume of coins in a short time span.
Creating the prfabs themselves was simple but it was one of those moments where I had to take a step back and appreciate the dreams I had when I was younger and how amazing the realities of what I get to work on now are.
Creating the prfabs themselves was simple but it was one of those moments where I had to take a step back and appreciate the dreams I had when I was younger and how amazing the realities of what I get to work on now are.
I Think at This Point it's safe to say I have an unhealthy obsession with seeing my name in the Credits of the titles I work on , but I suppose there ARE worse obsessions I oculd have lol
