Wow I love this game - it's really G.O.O.D. - fun and exciting challenges, gorgeous design and melodic sound effects. Brain-tingling and a soothing sensory experience unlike any other. Can't stop playing!
Hi! My name is Erica. I'm the designer on Team Specimen. We wanted to make something quick to pick up and beautiful. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you for playing!
By the way - Facebook leaderboards are brand new. Good chance there's glory in connecting and playing if you wanna be on the global board. Oh and we promise we'll never spam or post on your behalf. :)
@kirielson A lot of prototyping I did was around how the blobs themselves move around. It started with a motion test from Erica, and then an ugly demo from me. This is a screenshot of the original app It was made in C++ in a framework called Cinder which I use a lot and can generally iterate pretty fast in. From there it was lots of back and forth seeing what felt good, and eventually porting it to Objective-C.
Some questions for the team:
1) What were some of the struggles you went through when deciding on how to price the game / monetization?
2) Any thoughts on how to best stand out in the crowded mobile space?
3) What are your future plans for the game?
2) Any thoughts on how to best stand out in the crowded mobile space?
There’s so many different kinds of derivative work. Some of it “ugh” and some of it is really super creative. More like an awesome remix. I think digging deep and trying to find a genuinely original spin on anything, helps. We’re not the only color game out there (and we won’t be the last), but hopefully Specimen doesn’t feel like any other color game you’ve played. Also, if I see a game that obviously has a lot of heart and soul when it comes to design -- Alto’s Adventure, anything by Vectorpark or Zach Gage, Dots / Two Dots, Ready Steady Bang -- I *will* download it, pretty much without thinking. Design is mega important to me (duh). If you have amazing animation, then I’m over the moon.
@AJ - for one. We prototyped so much! We actually had two other color-centric games before we got to the petri dish / organic blob paradigm. We got so much wrong before we figured out what felt right. As an animator I would make simulations in after effects. We had this board: http://gorociao.github.io/projec... where I would post iterations and updates to the game and visual design. Making the levels also took a lot of iteration. We ended up having a big spreadsheet in google docs that we could import into the game via json, I believe. In that spreadsheet we could specify a ton of different things -- really dial into adjusting hue, value, saturation, time and a ton of other little details to work on the level progression. Was a journey, especially as first time game-makers. Charlie also spent a lot of time on the specimens' organic behavior. I'll let him explain.
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