Bouncy Platforms

Bouncy Platforms was my first taste of mobile development of any kind. Granted I did have some experience in game development (see Hela project for this) mobile development came with a whole host of new challenges. I wanted to create this game in an attempt to emulate the feel of hyper-casual games, mainly flappy bird, instilling determination in players to break high scores.

The aim of the game is to keep the ball within the bounds of the screen by pressing to create platforms that are created perpendicular to the centre, one point is awarded per bounce on a platform. Herin lies my main pain point for mobile game development, especially one in which a there is potential for a competitive aspect. When there are so many mobile devices so how do we handle different aspect ratios, screen-sizes, etc. to keep the game fair? This problem only reared its head once the game was fully developed as I did not have the option to see the game on other phones other than my own during development.

I wanted to publish the game on the two major app stores (iOS App Store and Google Play Store) so that others could play without me sending dodgy zip files and telling them to install an APK. Frustratingly, apple charged $99 per year for a developer license. This seemed exorbitant, especially when I was a student just wanting to publish a silly game I made for fun. Googles pricing was much more reasonable. $15 one off registration fee!

The game expectedly had very few downloads from the public, likely because the game did have accessibility issues, and no marketing or prior work. The game was however well received when I showed family and friends, with them competing to get the highest score, exactly what I had hoped for! Because of this, I considered my project successful. Unfortunately, the original unity files have been lost so I cannot go back and fix issues that I previously mentioned.