SKYFEEDER

MOBILE GAME DESIGN + DEVELOPMENT
INHOUSE PROJECT — JVST

GAME CONCEPT

Play as Pancho the hungry Dragon. Fly around the forest collecting food for your three hungry babies. Your objective, keep the babies alive so they can grow up and help you collect food. Get flying – those babies get super hungry fast!

ABOUT THE PROJECT

During the winter one year, JVST decided to give me and three developers a small challenge. The challenge, create a mobile game in a month. ONE MONTH. Beginning to end, complete and launched before the new year. A showcase project for the upcoming year.

PHASE ONE: WIREFRAME

One of the biggest challenges creating a game from scratch is to figure out the mechanics and logic.

Asking an endless amount of questions. How does a user go from this screen to this screen?

With a good handful of questions solved on paper, the basic groundwork was solved and illustrated.

Download the wireframes

PHASE TWO: LOGIC

GAME MECHANICS

Collect birds, bunnies, and turtles from across the sweeping forest and pinelands to deliver to your precious babies.

REAL NATURE

Keep those goshdarn vultures from stealing your food by frying them with your fireball but be careful – you need time to recharge between each sizzling fireball.

LET THE FAMILY HELP

Keep those goshdarn vultures from stealing your food by frying them with your fireball but be careful – you need time to recharge between each sizzling fireball.

SCORE

Challenge your friends to see who can keep your babies fed the longest! Share your scores on Facebook and compete to have the best score!

PHASE THREE: UNDERSTANDING ANIMATION

With the groundwork laid out, the next step was to begin creating the characters. How are the characters going to move on screen? How do we accomplish the movement? What applications or code should we gear towards?

I began with simple concept sketches to understand how we were going to animate a flying dragon. Here are some of the simple flight patterns.

With the test flight sketches, I created GIF's to check the cycle of frames needed. (NOTE: The first animation was completely wrong.)

After a few test cycles and more studies, the flight pattern was finally looking accurate, with this stage complete, the character sketches began.

PHASE FOUR: CHARACTER MODEL SHEET

Each character started with a simple sketch, moving through variations of color and expression.

The character model sheet above shows the original dragon concept sketches.

With the team agreeing on the dragon choice, I began working on a series of expressions the dragon would make during game play.

Endless amounts of sketches were created showing different styles of movement, position and small animations to throw into the game.

SUPPORTING CHARACTER MODEL SHEETS

Each character was sketched out then traced and colored in Illustrator. Every element on the character's body was individually plotted in order to move the elements in Flash.

After each character was plotted and rendered, I haded the illustration files off to the development team to rig the bodies in Flash using the bone tool.

Download the model sheet

PHASE 5: CREATING THE STORY MODE

With all the characters, environments and assets handed over to the development team, I began working on the story modes and tutorials of the game play.