Coin collection system

Game designers struggle with bringing entertainment alongside their story or intentions of the game.

For example, take "Angry Birds" and strip it from the need to use as few birds as possible, what you get is a game that you shoot birds at pigs blindly. Doesn’t sound much fun, does it?

 "Angry Birds" instead makes you Aim at you're target and thus, when you do it well, you get cool stuff going on and you get STARS for achieving greatness.

Now, in our game, we wanted a way to measure success. But what is success in writing code (or dragging and dropping code)? There is no one way to resolve a problem, although many ways to fail. We could have chosen to measure the player's success by the quantity of code blocks they use and instruct them to try and use less. But that is just not enough.

Our solution is the Coin collection system.

Throughout the levels we scattered coins for the players to pick up, thus enabling two things

-          A way to measure success: the player gets 3 Stars for the level if he picks up all the coins. Plus, we made it so that the shorter the sequence that made you achieve the goal is shorter, the more Points you get. To get 3 stars you got to have a minimum amount of points, but the amount of points made in the level isn’t bound to this minimum.

-          A way to bring a challenge.

Now, go ahead, I challenge you to do better. J

Artwork made by Doron, made with the free photo editing program – Gimp2.

Facebook connection!

As planned, we managed to make a connection to the Facebook social network in order to connect the users (and see some statistics about usage) and enabling them to share their achievements in the game.

The service is available on either Android or (in later releases on IOS an Web).

Making the connection, is a simple technical procedure including downloading a corresponding SDK to the Platform you are working on, (in our case the Unity3D Engine),  then, going to the Facebook SDK website and following the instructions for how to do it.

Most of the process is simple, only thing left to do is to implement the desired functionality into the game (in addition to the mandatory function which initializes the integration with Facebook). In our case, we implemented a Login and a Publish function.

The nontechnical side of the process is actually signing in as a Facebook user in the game, on Android it is as simple as tapping the Login button, which will then open the native App on the device (if installed, otherwise, it pops up a Facebook login form). And that’s it, your logged in.

The game will then remember you have signed in with Facebook enabling you to share your progress with your Facebook buddies.

See you there!

Meet Hairy

Meet Hairy, the game's main character.

Hairy is an animated character made by the team with the help of Doron's father, who is an artist.

When we first thought of the game, we thought it would be enough to animate a 'Stick-Man' figure. But as work was made, Orr came up with the idea that maybe the character should be Fluffy and Cute. As he was thinking, he drew a prototype of what he thought.

After some more sketches, we managed to agree on the current form – Big eyed, Loose legged and loose arms (yes, like Rayman) and HAIRY. Thus- Hairy was made real.

Hairy was animated with the basic free version of "Spriter", an excellent tool for beginners, as well as intermediate animators to use.

See Hairy in our game – Hairy's Logic Quest…