Good day! Games are not my main activity, but rather a hobby. The article may be useful for novice indie-developers who, like me, have neither a team, nor familiar artists, nor a budget for freelancing and game promotion. But more importantly, there is enthusiasm, time and good ideas. So, who cares, please under the cut!

Idea

Immediately warn you that this is not my first game. But, nevertheless, I decided to make a very miniature game. I immediately decided that I wouldn’t have the atmospheric gaming world and the addictive gameplay, I just can't do it. It is necessary to attract the attention of players with something simpler. The idea of ​​the “2 Player” game came to mind, i.e. so that you can play together on one tablet. Then I looked into the gaming stores - there are not so few of these games, although it would seem that the era of online multiplayer games has already arrived. Sports games like football and hockey, a bunch of variations of air hockey, shooting, tanchiki and airplanes, quizzes and more. I didn’t want to make a variation of any of this, so I started inventing original gameplay. I thought not so long. So - the bugs. But not ordinary beetles, but hightech or cyberpunk beetles. Why not?). A lot of bugs. The whole screen in the beetles) Somehow this naturally emerged in my head. It remains to formalize the rules and begin to implement.
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Graphics

So let's start with the graphics. I can not draw. Totally. Therefore, I paid attention to pixelart. I decided to start with something simpler - I opened Photoshop and created a 16x16 canvas. On the existence of other, more suitable for pixelart tools, I, of course, suspected, but I did not have time to master them. It took half a day to create these 3 bugs. I redrawn a lot and picked up colors, then showed them to friends, then redrawn again. Then it turned out:



People who are involved in pixelart, paid attention to the atypical glow for this direction, there should not be any translucency. I decided to leave my variation.

Further bugs needed to be animated. I looked at Youtube video, which explained the process of movement of the legs of insects. I moved the pixels, I got a storyboard:



In addition, I decided to try to draw beetles in full face, you saw it on the icon and banner:

Gameplay

Time to come up with gameplay. As a basis, I decided to take a logical triangle, or a stone-scissors-paper scheme. Let the green beetles eat blue, the blue eat purple, the purple eat green. Let each player have 3 buttons to create bugs. To prevent the game from turning into a high-speed zhmakaniyu competition on the screen, you need to enter a resource for which bugs will be created. For a player to lose, he must have a life. Then I got the idea to combine this resource to create bugs and player health. Called it vitality. Vitality is constantly being restored. What's next in terms of balance? If the first player starts building green bugs, the second one starts building purple ones and gains an advantage. The idea came to make Rush (which later influenced the name). For a few seconds at the beginning of the round, vitality is not used to create bugs. This means that players will tap on the screen as quickly as possible, not really understanding what the opponent is doing. The player’s task is to create as many bugs as possible while they are free. In addition, I decided to diversify the control and made it possible to create beetles in the center and from the flanks.

AI

For those who have no one to play with, I decided to make an AI with three levels of difficulty. With AI it turned out to be quite simple - he, like the person, analyzes the situation and counteracts the opponent. The complexity is governed by the speed of analysis and the probability of error. For example, a simple AI determines which bug to build, 1 time per second. In addition, he may make a mistake with a probability of 50%. Difficult AI analyzes the situation 4 times per second (which, of course, is beyond the power of a person) and can make a mistake with a probability of 20%. In addition, a simple AI creates bugs only in the center, and a complex one can determine the flanks from which it is necessary to attack. When AI is playing, the right part is simply hidden in the interface.

Audio

Of course, making music with your own hands is beyond my abilities. So I decided to purchase a couple of tracks on audiojungle. I chose the style, it seemed to me, quite well - a mixture of heavy metal and dubstep.

Build and publish

It depends more on the development environment than on me. I use the latest version of Unity and have not imported any third-party assets, like Google Play Game Services (although I plan to do this in the future). Therefore, when assembling under iOS, there were no problems. I made a description of the game, screenshots, videos and sent for review. There is no review in Google (manually check only the age rating), so owners of Android devices can already play my game. A few words about creating a video. I used the Android SDK for capturing, and for editing I used Windows Movie Maker. I made a simple cutting and glued the pieces to the beat of the music, then I published it on Youtube:

Promotion

As I already wrote, I have no budget for promotion. But this does not mean that the game does not need to be promoted. Administrators of several development groups at VK kindly agreed to make reposts, a special thank you to Anton from Donetsk. I also created Temko on w3bsit3-dns.com and sent out announcements to news portals, attaching screenshots, videos, links and my version of the review. Well, I decided to write devstory on Habré, I hope, they will not punish me for it)

If you have questions - ask, be sure to answer. Thank you for your attention, I hope you were interested! I will be glad to your advice and comments!