Sunday, September 30, 2012

Shroomsters


I've been working on a casual game, targeted at iPhone and Android, called Shroomsters. I was initially inspired by an old game I loved as a kid, Wonder Boy 3: the Dragon's Trap (I re-played it again recently). However, as development progressed, it morphed into something quite different. At some stage I thought it would be interesting if we reversed the situation from Mario Brothers, and have mushrooms as the good guys against evil Italion plumbers. So the main protagonists are mushrooms, though the evil plumbers concept never materialized.



When I was in primary school and high school, I was spent a lot of time day-dreaming and drawing, though after school I focused on other things and neglected drawing / illustration altogether. For this project I decided to do the art myself, and so I picked up illustration again (this time in Photoshop, occasionally scanning in hand-drawn art and re-creating it on PC). Although the art style is very simplistic, but I'm quite happy with the style of the end result.



Similarly, musicianship is something that I was passionate about that I have neglected in recent years, so I decided to make the music myself. I deliberately went for an old-school chiptunes feel, inspired by the music of the old 8-bit and 16-bit platform games, and arcade games of that era. Examples of games whose music I particularly liked are Sonic the Hedgehog, Wonderboy 3 and Ghosts 'n Ghouls.



The game features four campaigns, each with its own theme. These are differentiated by their visual backdrops, audio tracks and play styles (for example, some favour puzzle-type play, others favour the good old-fashioned left-to-right platformer style). Additionally, each campaign features a different (though sometimes overlapping) set of enemy monsters. The campaigns are called 'Mushroom Dawn', 'Ice Crags', 'Enchanted Garden' and 'Apocalypse City'.

The game was developed using the Unity engine. All programming was done in C#.