Bouncy Smash Game Development Journey Thread

Hi there!

We all know that developing a game takes a lot of heart, energy and time. With the launch of Bouncy Smash earlier this week on iOS and Apple TV, we also wanted to take a moment to reflect on all the steps that got us to this point.

From changing Bouncy Smash’s game engine two times in a single year to accidentally launching a few months early on the App store, the devs discuss some of the changes, panic attacks and triumphs associated with creating a game and seeing it through to completion.

“There would be high points and low points, there would be planned launches and subsequently delayed launches. There would be more obstacles that we can number. However, through all the hardship that releasing a game would bring, we now knew Bouncy Smash was no longer a side project — we were going to ship a game.”

You can read the rest of the “The Story of Bouncy Smash” on Medium:

Medium.com

We’d love to know if you faced similar (or different!) challenges in creating your game, and we’re happy to offer advice if you have any questions. We wish you the best of luck in your game development journey!

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Greetings!

I’m Kat, the Community Manager for Bouncy Smash – an iOS platformer developed by IV Studio. We wanted to share some more development challenges with you all in the hopes that they might help other game devs out there. This is IV Studio’s first game, so a lot of this process involved learning as you go – which I’m sure many of you can relate to!

Throughout the entire process, the biggest hurdle was also the simplest one to fix. Pretty late in the development cycle, everything was running smoothly – and the devs were focusing on relatively small bugs. They pushed a build out with seemingly innocuous changes and bug fixes – when out of nowhere, they got a huge leak in the code. Much to the team’s horror, the longer somebody played the game, the worse the performance got. Over the course of a weekend, the devs spent more than 30 hours trying to figure out what in the world happened. The problem? In Unity, they had absentmindedly clicked the “Render HDR” button thinking it might look cool. They clicked one little radio button, forgot about it for a few days, and then spent 30 hours discovering that they needed to uncheck that option. That’s what it’s like developing your first game (LOL)!

Other than that, figuring things out from an animation standpoint was interesting. They had to determine out how to apply animation principles for videos (squash and stretch, anticipation and overshoot, acceleration and deceleration, weighting) to make them work in real-time and on a phone. From a traditional viewpoint, you normally aren’t limited by real-time rendering.

(In addition to Unity, here’s what the team used to create the game: Cinema4D, After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, Zbrush, and FMOD.)

Frustrations and learning curves aside, the devs have enjoyed the journey and are excited that Bouncy Smash is available on iOS and tvOS. Itunes.apple.com

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Posted 3/12/2018

Hi there!

We’re a little more than a week past launch and we wanted to share some of our post-launch stories with you in a series of mini vlogs we produced!

As many of you know, the development journey never ends. In “Very Helpful Feedback,” we share some of the more entertaining reviews we received and how we plan on incorporating community suggestions. One of the more interesting things that’s happened is being featured as a top sticker pack on the iOS App Store. In “Did We Make a Game or a Sticker Pack?” we share our disbelief and amusement when we charted 90th for stickers. In our last vlog “We Got Featured,” we discuss...well...being a featured on Apple’s New Games We Love List!

We hope you enjoy them, and we would love to hear some of your own stories! If you have any questions, feel free to ask

App.frame.io

Hello everyone!

The IV Studio team is headed to Boston to attend PAX East, and we have some exciting news to share: Bouncy Smash was selected for the PAX East Indie Showcase! Only four games are selected each year, and we are beyond thrilled to be one of the “best indie games you’ve never heard of available on mobile platforms.”

You can check out the four finalists (ourselves included) here: East.paxsite.com

If you’re attending PAX East April 5th - 8th, we hope you’ll stop by to say hello!

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Hey there!

The IV Studio team had a blast at PAX East and was super excited to be one of four games featured in the PAX East Indie Showcase. On PAX setup day, they rode down the escalator slack-jawed and eyes wide with anticipation. Austin Harrison, Producer and Lead Tester at IV Studio, can still recall a few faces from the large number of people who stopped by to play Bouncy Smash. There was a mom and son Mario and Luigi duo, a cosplayer wearing creepy contact lenses that made their eyes a wicked color, and a kid no older than 4 that performed better than half the adults who stopped by. But none of these stick out in his mind more than the guy that absolutely wrecked his high score.

Immediately noticing his skill, Austin told him the PAX high score was 11 million. Reflecting on it now, he wishes he hadn’t encouraged him. Soon, this first-time player was soaring past 11 million and well on his way to third place globally. Austin watched in horror as he passed 20 million – something previously only Eric and Austin (Bouncy Smash’s creators) were able to accomplish. The player ended with a mind boggling 30,771,200 points. No one else at PAX ever got close to half of that score.

PAX was an amazing time comprised of meeting new people, sharing the game the IV Studio team worked so hard on, and seeing awesome things that other developers had worked incredibly hard on. What took the cake for Austin, however, was the moment his global high score was beaten by a guy on his very first game. It was, quite possibly, one of the coolest things that’s ever happened in the team’s time working on Bouncy Smash.

If you took the time to check out the IV Studio booth to play Bouncy Smash, thanks for stopping by! We hope you enjoyed your time with the game. For those who attended, we hope you had a great time, too!

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I’d like you to meet Arlo, the round hero of IV Studio’s colorful arcade game Bouncy Smash. If you didn’t think a sphere could have a personality, guess again. Not only is Arlo opinionated, he also loves collecting new outfits to wear while smashing his way through the bad guys.

In the beginning, the dev team thought there would be 5 different heroes you could unlock over time, similar to Alto's Adventure. They eventually realized that there wasn't going to be a good way to differentiate these different character's abilities in game enough to warrant different character unlockables, so they decided to just do one hero – Arlo. Narrowing this down to one character also allowed the team to introduce unlockable cosmetics and color skins which became a part of the core loop.

You can help Arlo defeat enemy waves and bounce to new heights in Bouncy Smash, now available on the iOS and tvOS store.
Itunes.apple.com

Launch Day. The end of a chapter in a game developer’s journey and a big step forward for your game. Releasing your game to the public is a big deal, and we would like to share our Bouncy Smash launch day experiences, mishaps and advice with you.

Below are three tips we have for game developers gearing up for launch day. We hope they’ll help you successfully smash this next chapter of your game’s life cycle!

• Share your game. If you have an opportunity to attend a convention or get your game in front of people prior to launch day, do it. Share it and watch people’s faces as they play it. Seeing a smile erupt on somebody’s face just because they crushed a baddie in something you created from nothing is a hard feeling to explain — joy mixed with disbelief mixed with self-doubt.
• Sometimes, you won’t launch on your launch date, and that’s okay. We planned to release Bouncy Smash in November 2017, then that turned into December 2017. Ultimately, we released on February 20, 2018. Like every other setback that happened in the development of Bouncy Smash, delaying our launch proved to be a serendipitous occurrence. We’ve learned to roll with the punches and not get caught up in the failure of our best laid plans.

• Surround yourself with people who have done it before. Whether they’re your friends or paid consultants, having people with a deep knowledge of the industry around you will help you make the best decisions possible. Without the people we had in our corner, we would have made countless mistakes that could have easily derailed everything we were trying to build.

We hope this advice is useful to you as you prepare to launch your game. If you’ve already launched, please leave your advice in the comments!

Kat @ IV Studios

Facebook: Facebook.com

Twitter:Twitter.com

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Reining in the scope of your project is one thing to which most game developers can relate. In order to stay on target, Bouncy Smash developer’s IV Studios left a lot of great ideas on the cutting room floor. But in managing scope creep, they were able to release a better game and better experience for players. Here’s some tips from IV Studio to keep in mind on your own project:

• Stick to your vision! Set out a core vision at the beginning of your project and ask if every decision or new feature fulfills this vision. IV Studios has found this approach to be extremely helpful during their many years of client animation work. Sound interesting? Check out "The Vision Based Methodology!" for details.

• Don’t rush your ideas. Give yourself some time between ideation and execution. It's easy to get really excited about a new idea for your game and immediately drop what you’re doing to try and implement it (because it's fun and exciting!). IV Studio lost a lot of development time trying to build features they later realized weren't important. When you have a new idea, write it down and talk about it with your friends or teammates; but first, finish the features you're already working on. If you and your team are still excited about the idea after finishing your current projects, then it might be worth pursuing!

• Learn from others. Find developers/teams with similar games and ask what features they found most important (and what might be a waste of time!). For example, IV Studio spent a lot of time creating Facebook leaderboards for Bouncy Smash. Part way through development, they learned from a friend who made a similar game how few people actually signed up for Facebook leaderboards. Because of this, IV Studios scaled back this feature dramatically. In another example, one of the goals for IV Studios was to get their game featured by Apple so they brought on an ex-Apple employee as a consultant who helped pick and choose which features were important from their perspective.

What advice or questions do you have when it comes to scope creep? Let us know in the comments!

Edited by: katastrophic88