Hi all, make yourself comfortable and be prepared to listen to the story on how we made our first game – BeatCoin AR.
Idea
The idea to create this game was born a long time ago, but I never feel like it was the right moment, because I wanted to create something different than just a regular runner or jumper type game. The “Aha” moment happened when I was watching the Apple Conference, where they announced Augmented Reality. This technology was not new, but the way Apple was approaching it with all the 3D space, location and anchors, my thought was that we can use it to create a very simple, but unique game experience. The main problem is that I never coded games before, so thanks to Udemy I started to dive into tuttorials on Concept Art, Unity, C# coding, and 3D.
After a couple of months of training, we started to develop the blueprint for the game. Coins appear around the chest and you collect one coin at the time by touching it with your phone and then throwing in the chest to get a score. Very easy and basic, but the main thing was that it is doable project with the level of knowledge and experience that we had. Here are our final concepts of the chest and coin.
3D models
This was the longest and hardest stage of the process. You know that feeling you get after watching many online tutorials how you think you know how to do it? But still, don’t know where to start? After a couple weeks of procrastination, I finally got myself together and started working and was very happy with the final result.
Developing Process
This stage is called, why is my brain acting like Windows Vista? Slow, but doing something. I am not a professional coder, but as soon as you start to understand logic, it starts to become clear. But there were a couple of moments when I finally created a test build and uploaded it to the phone and then asked yourself: “What is the chest doing on the wall or why are the coins shooting like a machine gun?”
Release
We were very excited finally to have a working build and thought that the release of the game on the Apple Store will be very quick and fast. Until we dealt with this task face to face. Firstly, you need a Mac to do it and, secondly, your Mac cannot be old, otherwise, it will take more than 6 hours to create the build and another 3 hours to upload it to the store. During this process, I finished two parts of Lord of the Rings and a couple of TV shows. Thirdly, you need to create so many certificates that I’ve never done in my entire career in the IT industry. And of course, odd stuff will always come, as for example, our BeatCoin AR app store icon for some reason has these odd edges.
But after all of these challenges we reached the finish line. BeatCoin AR was released on 2 April 2018. We were thrilled! You can download the game here:
Conclusion
It was our first game development. And I think that it had its ups and downs, but at the end of the day when I look at this game and see that some people responded and loved it – it feels really good. If at least one or two people had 3 seconds of fun playing it, we are happy.
Next Goal
For us, it was the good experience, but we want to raise the bar. Our idea is to redesign and add more stuff to this game. We are planning to release the updated version of the game in the end of September or middle of October.
We are going to share the whole development process with you and, guys, feel free to leave your comment on what you think we should add and we will choose the best comment and add you to the credits in the game. Thanks and good luck!
Link to the original post: here
