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[BilbyCoder]

InfiniBounce - A Game In One Week

Taking a break from Nitere and Terrene with the goal to make something from concept to release in one week.  The game?  A bouncing ball juggling game for mobile phone.



The game is simple, tap or hold your finger to the touch screen and bounce the ball.  Keep it bouncing and make sure that none drop below the screen.  If even one ball drops, it's game over.

My ever hard working friend Ledi has once again put together nice artwork on short notice.  She is even putting together a few more themes for some extra backgrounds.

There are two areas that need work:

The UI
The evolution of the UI Plan from version 2 -> 3 -> 4 as either the programmer nixed layouts he hadn't figured out how to code for yet or new layout options were discussed.  Also, thinking back I don't think I ever saw version 1.



Then the plan met the programmer who just wanted to get something working to test the code.



I will not be allowed to release the game unless its UI gets into shape (not if I want to retain the co-operation of Ledi).

Mobile Store
So the plan is to use this game to experiment with micro-transactions, to do that I need to learn the store system.  I'm using Soomla a free Unity compatible API which covers both Apple and Google stores.

My hope is to have everything ready in two days.  I'm allowing myself 3 - 4.  If I succeed, this will be the fastest turn around for a game that I've made.

[BilbyCoder]

UI Update

The UI has been improved, and is now prototyping the actual functionality of the game.



I have also recorded a short gameplay video:

[BilbyCoder]

So the title of this thread is "InfiniBounce - A game made in a week"

This statement is mostly true, but also turning out to be a lie.

The core game itself was made in less than a week.  It was made in four hours or so.  The mechanic of bouncing the ball hasn't changed since I started working on it.

Everything else though... that is taking up a lot more than a week.

Most of the last week I've spent getting introduced to handling payments through Google Play and Soomla.  This was an exercise in frustration as it just. wouldn't. work.  Then it did.  So now I have test payments going through the play store.  Most of the difficulty came from not setting up my test environment in Google correctly.  Once I had that sorted out it was wiring Soomla up to get the correct localised price.

All this has pushed the process out much longer than the time I was hoping below.

New Gameplay Features
We are working on a new feature in the gameplay.  A simple extra interaction of a bird which can be hit by the ball.  It doesn't do anything other than get hit and fall off the screen, but it will add a bit of variety to the game.

Ledi has been hard at work on the model, and on creating a beach scene, and the game logo.  This has been hindered by a hand injury which is fortunately getting better.  All my appreciation to her for soldiering on through it.   

The Game Logo:

The Bird WIP:

The beach scene still has a bit of work left to do on it before it is previewed here.

[BilbyCoder]

A quick update today, just a couple of animated gifs.

The Bird WIP Animated:


Clouds are now drifting across the scene:

[BilbyCoder]

This week I've been implementing the stats for the game.  The game will track:

Highest Score
Total Bounces
Total Collisions
Longest Game
Total Play Time
Time finger has been held to the screen

I'd have this done too...

If unity hadn't crashed killing 3 hours of work.   

Always remember Ctrl+S every few minutes.  A lesson I thought I'd learned long ago.

[BilbyCoder]

Hmmm, this has been dead for a while hasn't it?

A year ago I talked about making a game in a week.  And I did.  The core game-play never changed, was hardly touched.  And then we released Nitere to itch.io and failed to make a multi-player action puzzle game (that one I will return to some day).

But a few months ago I remembered InfiniBounce existed, dusted off the project, simplified the whole thing and have now released it for free (with removable ad support) on Android.

A trailer for InfiniBounce in it's final form can be viewed on Binary Sprite's


The game can be found on Google's store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.BinarySprite.InfiniBounce

This is our first release onto one of the mobile stores.  We will have it available on iOS soon.

(I think I failed at that 3 - 4 day turn around)