Flavor Monsters
Gameplay of Flavor Monsters !!!! I believe to date the title has had over 1 million downloads on both Android and iOS !
Flavor Monsters is the third videogame I have worked on thus far and the one I am most proud of so far. It is a base-defense game centering around protecting a special landmark in 1 of 6 territories that take place across the U.S. . It was a huge step in a different direction of our time in several ways from the development process to the tools we used and more but its been an awesome experience and I feel like due to it i am a better developer now .
Aside from the generic screens ,such as the pause menu or the fact dialogue, I did not plan or design any of the art for these menus . Almost everything was the product of the client or our in-house 2D Team however I had the pleasure of making everything shown function in-game .
Aside from the generic screens ,such as the pause menu or the fact dialogue, I did not plan or design any of the art for these menus . Almost everything was the product of the client or our in-house 2D Team however I had the pleasure of making everything shown function in-game .
Flavor Monsters has been pretty awesome for me this is the first game where the things i have worked on are front and center "main attractions" mainly in the main menu and the field manual. For the main menu I worked on everything from positioning the buttons , vignette, and logo to actually creating the background scene with the camera rotating around the stripped-down city .
Another very fun and first time experience I had was creating user feed back such as buttons expanding on the players touch . This led to me writing a script with public fields for tweaking the expanded size parameters ( as well as the initial size parameters) and testing it on buttons in several different areas of the game. For me this was the first time i felt I really got to get a feel for the " User Experience' portion of my job. Though a very overlooked portion i do believe it is one of those subtle details that make a game more accessible to player. In the above screenshot you can see the left blimp button has expanded slightly larger than the right one in addition to lighting up.
Much of our game runs off a Events-driven system established by out lead programmer, the core component of the visual / UI-side of this system revolves around the instantiation of dialogs which are essentially prefabs with expanded functionality. In this example our loss screen is a dialog which is called using the event system and from that dialog on touch we instantiate the fact prefab . For a game like flavor monsters where there is a predetermined order and series of displaying and removing these dialogs the event system is key .
I created several of the dialogs , not many involving messaging but many of the ones activated while browsing through menus . The pause menu is one of those generic dialogs i worked on . i think the most special thing about it was it was one of the earliest dialogs in which i linked the touch of in -scene objects to actual script functions such as making the quit button return to the main menu or resume dismiss the pause menu. simple most definitely , but really was the base of the rest of the work i did for the rest of he game's developement.
Not only is my name listed in the credits ( See !), I actually composed the credits dialog along with the EULA and TOS as well as the base options menu dialog.
The field manual itself is a combination of dialogs and a special prefab loader class that loads and destroys prefabs according to their selection with a manager class. working on it was a lot of fun and thanks to our Lead programmer I was able to make it not ony function excellently but also make it look pretty nice as well I think.
This is a Level Unlocking Animation I was the lead in implementing. When a level is unlocked we temporarily disable all map button presses and delay the actual level unlocking event just long enough for the smoke particles to dissipate and then our map is " magically unlocked"!
I also created the text boxes for deleting the player data , i used the framework created by our lead programmer to make it so that on the yes button press we delete player data from player prefs, on no I simply destroy the text box prefab .
The box that appears in the upper left corner of this screenshot containing the boss icon , name, and level they associated with is a prefab instantiated on Start() based on the previous " airship" level defeated. In order to do so i just pass the name of the previous level loaded into a switch statement and instantiate one of 6 prefabs ( 7 if you include default case) based on that .
Another confirmation panel I made however this one is the first time i used delegates with the help of a senior programmer. depending on the button pressed to access this prefab when the yes button is pressed one of several scenes can be loaded.
At the end of Flavor Monsters the player is awarded this coin game which I co-developed with our intern. this is basically a big cash-grab reward for those who managed to beat the entire game. Essentially we instantiate the coins just above the cameras view where we drop the coins with a randomized velocity . if the player presses a coin we then instantiate the shiny particle effect and increment the coin count. Initially we made this separate from flavor monsters and we integrated it in the final days of development.
One of my final tasks and a first for me was making a url that could be opened within the app.After the player has defeated the final boss and tries to move forward from the level complete screen his prefab slides into view when pressed it opens the default browser and plays the video attached to the link shown.
