Driving Question: How can we create and design a mobile game that is marketed as fun but also portrays themes of entrepreneurship and science?
Full Project Link: https://sites.google.com/view/independentstudymodule/home
Project Overview: Throughout this module, we designed, coded, and built a tycoon clicker-based game that educates users on concepts of business and biology whilst maintaining a fun marketing campaign.
First, we studied game design by recreating an arcade game of our choice including code and user interface. The next step was to continue the development of our game, which we created the base concept and plan for in China. We built the wireframe, sound design, and rest of the graphics for the game throughout the Blockchain module.
Game Concept Summary: Our game is an idle clicker/tycoon game. The main concept behind this genre is that you collect money in order to spend money on making money faster. The genre follows this loop consistently, but we have put our own little twist on it. In the game, the player starts off by getting their own restaurant. In this restaurant the player has to keep upgrading to keep bringing in more customers, selling better food and making more money. This restaurant is a special one that uses Genetically Modified Food (GMOs) to make the restaurant more efficient.
Formative 1: Recoded Arcade Game To practice creating and finishing a product, we wanted to recode an arcade game. We chose space invaders, and simplified it to its core mechanics. We coded this and drew the visual assets over the process of around 3 days.
Formative 2: Hi-Fi Wireframe In order to plan our game effectively, we needed to create a wireframe. This helps us to test the UI and how users will move around the game. This began with a Lo-Fi wireframe but developed into our Hi-Fi Wireframe.
Formative 3: Sample of Soundtrack We looked into the process of creating a video game soundtrack in order to begin designing our own one. We ended up creating a quick sample of a soundtrack for our game.
Formative 4: Marketing Plan We investigated how to market video games, and the best methods to do so. We also investigated to work out the best target demographic for our game. Eventually we used this research to create a marketing plan.
