Nom Nom Monkey - Development Thread by Uninspired Productions
Here is our build info and newest update for Nom Nom Monkey, in total now we have spent nearly 2 years building this via Gamesalad and I thought I would share some insights on our build process and some of my new ideas with you guys!
For the last 2 and a bit years I have soaked up a wealth of knowledge from these forums and I thought it was time to give something back and maybe share a bit about our game building process for our app Nom Nom Monkey.
We have rebuilt Nom Nom Monkey at least 3 or 4 times over, each time we see a new feature added to the Gamesalad creator I try to include it if its going to be relevant. It started off a simple fruit catching game with the initial idea of a monkey holding a barrel, walking back and forth catching as much fruit as possible.
Right at the very start, during the testing process of working out how to even make a score from eating fruit. This was around the first few weeks of us using Gamesalad.
This is one of sketches for the title screen once we had fleshed out most parts of the game. I find it easier to draw once I know what direction and theme the game will have.
Here you can see the game starting to take shape and move towards our combo score design, still testing ideas and setting up the actors.
The initial idea is still there but the game evolved and is still constantly evolving, at some point we are going to have to draw a line in the sand and move on to the next project. But for now this app has been a great learning tool to test our ideas and see how well they work in a finished polished game.
Very early on the conversation of achievements came up.
At this time there wasn't Gamecenter support in Gamesalad as yet, so we set up all the integer values and rules/triggers and made up 24 in game Unlockable Achievements for the games initial release. This part of the build was my favourite, getting to name the achievements and setting their values was a laugh. For example, we have an achievement called "Narcolepsy" which all you have to do to unlock it is leave the pause menu open for 5 minutes. It was just one of those things that allowed us to give the game some replay value if you felt the gameplay wasn't enough to keep you coming back for more. For our recent update we increased that to 35 (a round number seemed nicer and we had added some device time related achievements).
I remember playing some of the more high profile games like Jetpack Joyride and seeing the stats menu, which I thought was pretty cool to have that info handy. Let me give you a tip, building a stats menu and Game integers is a piece of cake. Putting it all into a sliding vertical menu and individually editing each actor to relate to its number equation and interger value (10/100/1000 etc) is a LOT of work and I don't even know if players look at it. But its the extra polish we thought would make our game stand out, maybe. (No one has told us if they use they yet and we have about 500 copies of the game out there on the App Store).
The gameplay very early on was just one mode and was set out in levels/worlds. The idea was each level you had to catch a specific amount of specific fruit, i.e. 25 Bananas, 30 Apples. Tick both those boxes and you move onto the next level.
It was a complete yawn fest, it just didn't feel like you had achieved anything. All you had to do was catch some fruit to level up.
So we looked at 2 modes that had two different dynamics and we came up with Frenzy and Survival.
Frenzy evolved into a 60 second mad dash for a quick highscore, but with the option to extend your game time and improve your score by nomming the randomly selected golden fruit. We also opted to give the golden fruit double their normal value points to give players an incentive to eat them and allow them to find out that they get more game time if they fill up the SUPER MEGA TIME BONUS bar. It plays great and I'm sure at some point we will revisit it and give some more features/tweaks.
Survival is by far my favourite mode, its that simple all you have to do is survive and set the high score to beat!
This runs the same fruit dropping engine as frenzy but with double the fruit (after a delay) and two of Nom Noms worst enemies, the spear and bomb.
The spear was a late add in prior to our initial release and really made the mode come alive, they pop up from the ground and block Nom Nom from getting past. It means you are constantly making sure you aren't directly underneath a bomb because that would almost mean certain death. For me this changed the dynamic massively and the behaviours behind it were very simple! Finally something easy to build/add to a mode and it didn't have to break anything, well except for pushing Nom Noms head off from time to time but we fixed that prior to release. Haha.
The bombs are simple, just like the fruit they fall from the top of the scene and slowly make their way down swaying in their parachutes. In the recent update we actually added some bombs that fall just as fast as the fruit without any parachutes and it definitely is going to make the mode harder but the leader boards are still showing some highscores that I didn't think were possible!
The SUPER MEGA COMBO BONUS came about because we though a risk/reward system would be cool in this mode. If you keep your 9x Combo going for 10 seconds you can actually earn up to a 19x bonus when the bar is full! But you can also get a x1 bonus that will essentially risk you losing all your combo. It worked well and the scores can be massive if you get lucky with a 19x bonus.
Then came the update to Gamesalad that added gamecenter leaderboards! Nom Nom Monkey is purely a score based game, there was no way gamecenter wasn't going to make its way into our update.
It didn't come without its own set of issues, setting up the leaderboards in iTunes connect was simple enough and the behaviour rules in GS was fine. But I wanted it to be automatic login and auto score posting, we tried setting up a Auto login but if you don't have 3G coverage or wifi it locks up the game. The same issue is there if you automatically try to send the scores to gamecenter, it just locks up the game and you have to exit out of the app and reset the app.
Has anyone else dealt with this? I think the way we set it up in the game works fine and no one has complained/emailed me yet but I'm interested to know if there was any tricks I might have missed?
So to summarise, we set out in 2010 to start our games company and as soon as we saw this platform I knew we had a way to do it. From start to finish we have had some amazing inspiration from so many people on these forums (tshirtbooth, joe from firemaple games and quantum sheep just to name a few), which inspired us to look deeper into the possibilities of what we could build and create inside of the Gamesalad platform.
If you want to check out our game on your iPhone/iPad let me know and I can send you a promo code for the updated version.
(its not up on the Gamesalad arcade due to the gamecenter rules etc, I will edit the file for a arcade version soon).
Or if your feeling generous and want to support a ambitious indie dev team of 2, you can buy it from the App Store for $0.99
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/nom-nom-monkey/id471583184?mt=8
We still have a heap of ideas for the game, for example in the next update we are looking at making Nom Nom get fat and have a couple of different animation cycles that make him get fatter and slower as he Noms and builds up a bigger combo chain so that if you want that high combo multiplier you will risk it all by being slow and fat. Or maybe its because I really want to see a fat slow monkey. Haha.
Let me know what you would do differently, how do you build your games?
What inspires you to keep going, is it the passion to build something unique?
Thanks for reading this far, if you want to know anything about our game don't hesitate to ask.
If I can help you out with a question about how we made something work or if your having problems with a feature in your own game, just let me know and I will help out where I can.
Cheers, Dan from Uninspired Productions/Lunch Time Games
For the last 2 and a bit years I have soaked up a wealth of knowledge from these forums and I thought it was time to give something back and maybe share a bit about our game building process for our app Nom Nom Monkey.
We have rebuilt Nom Nom Monkey at least 3 or 4 times over, each time we see a new feature added to the Gamesalad creator I try to include it if its going to be relevant. It started off a simple fruit catching game with the initial idea of a monkey holding a barrel, walking back and forth catching as much fruit as possible.
Right at the very start, during the testing process of working out how to even make a score from eating fruit. This was around the first few weeks of us using Gamesalad.
This is one of sketches for the title screen once we had fleshed out most parts of the game. I find it easier to draw once I know what direction and theme the game will have.
Here you can see the game starting to take shape and move towards our combo score design, still testing ideas and setting up the actors.
The initial idea is still there but the game evolved and is still constantly evolving, at some point we are going to have to draw a line in the sand and move on to the next project. But for now this app has been a great learning tool to test our ideas and see how well they work in a finished polished game.
Very early on the conversation of achievements came up.
At this time there wasn't Gamecenter support in Gamesalad as yet, so we set up all the integer values and rules/triggers and made up 24 in game Unlockable Achievements for the games initial release. This part of the build was my favourite, getting to name the achievements and setting their values was a laugh. For example, we have an achievement called "Narcolepsy" which all you have to do to unlock it is leave the pause menu open for 5 minutes. It was just one of those things that allowed us to give the game some replay value if you felt the gameplay wasn't enough to keep you coming back for more. For our recent update we increased that to 35 (a round number seemed nicer and we had added some device time related achievements).
I remember playing some of the more high profile games like Jetpack Joyride and seeing the stats menu, which I thought was pretty cool to have that info handy. Let me give you a tip, building a stats menu and Game integers is a piece of cake. Putting it all into a sliding vertical menu and individually editing each actor to relate to its number equation and interger value (10/100/1000 etc) is a LOT of work and I don't even know if players look at it. But its the extra polish we thought would make our game stand out, maybe. (No one has told us if they use they yet and we have about 500 copies of the game out there on the App Store).
The gameplay very early on was just one mode and was set out in levels/worlds. The idea was each level you had to catch a specific amount of specific fruit, i.e. 25 Bananas, 30 Apples. Tick both those boxes and you move onto the next level.
It was a complete yawn fest, it just didn't feel like you had achieved anything. All you had to do was catch some fruit to level up.
So we looked at 2 modes that had two different dynamics and we came up with Frenzy and Survival.
Frenzy evolved into a 60 second mad dash for a quick highscore, but with the option to extend your game time and improve your score by nomming the randomly selected golden fruit. We also opted to give the golden fruit double their normal value points to give players an incentive to eat them and allow them to find out that they get more game time if they fill up the SUPER MEGA TIME BONUS bar. It plays great and I'm sure at some point we will revisit it and give some more features/tweaks.
Survival is by far my favourite mode, its that simple all you have to do is survive and set the high score to beat!
This runs the same fruit dropping engine as frenzy but with double the fruit (after a delay) and two of Nom Noms worst enemies, the spear and bomb.
The spear was a late add in prior to our initial release and really made the mode come alive, they pop up from the ground and block Nom Nom from getting past. It means you are constantly making sure you aren't directly underneath a bomb because that would almost mean certain death. For me this changed the dynamic massively and the behaviours behind it were very simple! Finally something easy to build/add to a mode and it didn't have to break anything, well except for pushing Nom Noms head off from time to time but we fixed that prior to release. Haha.
The bombs are simple, just like the fruit they fall from the top of the scene and slowly make their way down swaying in their parachutes. In the recent update we actually added some bombs that fall just as fast as the fruit without any parachutes and it definitely is going to make the mode harder but the leader boards are still showing some highscores that I didn't think were possible!
The SUPER MEGA COMBO BONUS came about because we though a risk/reward system would be cool in this mode. If you keep your 9x Combo going for 10 seconds you can actually earn up to a 19x bonus when the bar is full! But you can also get a x1 bonus that will essentially risk you losing all your combo. It worked well and the scores can be massive if you get lucky with a 19x bonus.
Then came the update to Gamesalad that added gamecenter leaderboards! Nom Nom Monkey is purely a score based game, there was no way gamecenter wasn't going to make its way into our update.
It didn't come without its own set of issues, setting up the leaderboards in iTunes connect was simple enough and the behaviour rules in GS was fine. But I wanted it to be automatic login and auto score posting, we tried setting up a Auto login but if you don't have 3G coverage or wifi it locks up the game. The same issue is there if you automatically try to send the scores to gamecenter, it just locks up the game and you have to exit out of the app and reset the app.
Has anyone else dealt with this? I think the way we set it up in the game works fine and no one has complained/emailed me yet but I'm interested to know if there was any tricks I might have missed?
So to summarise, we set out in 2010 to start our games company and as soon as we saw this platform I knew we had a way to do it. From start to finish we have had some amazing inspiration from so many people on these forums (tshirtbooth, joe from firemaple games and quantum sheep just to name a few), which inspired us to look deeper into the possibilities of what we could build and create inside of the Gamesalad platform.
If you want to check out our game on your iPhone/iPad let me know and I can send you a promo code for the updated version.
(its not up on the Gamesalad arcade due to the gamecenter rules etc, I will edit the file for a arcade version soon).
Or if your feeling generous and want to support a ambitious indie dev team of 2, you can buy it from the App Store for $0.99
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/nom-nom-monkey/id471583184?mt=8
We still have a heap of ideas for the game, for example in the next update we are looking at making Nom Nom get fat and have a couple of different animation cycles that make him get fatter and slower as he Noms and builds up a bigger combo chain so that if you want that high combo multiplier you will risk it all by being slow and fat. Or maybe its because I really want to see a fat slow monkey. Haha.
Let me know what you would do differently, how do you build your games?
What inspires you to keep going, is it the passion to build something unique?
Thanks for reading this far, if you want to know anything about our game don't hesitate to ask.
If I can help you out with a question about how we made something work or if your having problems with a feature in your own game, just let me know and I will help out where I can.
Cheers, Dan from Uninspired Productions/Lunch Time Games
Comments
The latest update has all the new nice menu upgrades, when we started 2 years ago I had no idea how to use Adobe Illustrator, I recommend as the perfect artwork program for this kind of 2D game development.
Cheers, Dan from U.P