Waffle Queen
Platform: Engine: Language: Tools Used: Duration: Team Size: 2 Role:
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Overview Waffle Queen is a wacky action-puzzler combining modern day action-puzzle gameplay elements with the classic "go for the high score" simplicity of a classic arcade game. You play as the Queen's personal waffle chef. Gameplay Video |
Screenshots
Detailed Info
Design
One day, I decided to brainstorm game ideas and the first word that popped to my head was 'waffles.' So I rolled with that concept as a basis for brainstorming. After a few potential ideas where thrown out, I settled on an action-puzzle game that was very simple: feed a ravenous queen waffles until she's so fat she passes out and you can escape with the highest score you can get. The more calories in the waffle toppings, the faster she will get fat!
I managed to convince my artist friend/coworker, Whitney, to do the art after letting her play the initial prototype and see my sketches for the queen. I setup collaboration and production tools such as SVN, Dropbox, Google docs for task trackers, calendars, etc. that both Whitney and I were comfortable with. Eight weeks later, after several playtests and revisions, we managed to publish Waffle Queen to the Apple App Store and submit it to the 2011 Independent Game Festival!
The design was simple and iterative. I knew that I wanted the game to be easy to understand and challenging. As the levels progress, the game gets faster by having the toppings move faster and the queen's Hunger Meter drop faster. This may seem exponential or random, but it took a lot of playtesting and doing charts and math in Excel to get the right feel. The game's speed increase is ALMOST exponential, but not really. A true exponential increase made it impossible to get to the last level, while it made the early levels far too easy and boring. So by playing with the math in Excel and making charts, I was able to balance the game's speed pretty well so it feels good.
I knew I needed some sort of powerups to add variety and strategy. Thus, the powerup toppings were born. The Wildcard counts for whatever topping is predominant it's row or column. The Cupcake is an extra life. The Butter refills the Hunger Meter entirely. The Bomb removes a placed topping from the waffle. Each can be used to add more player choice and strategy options.
After our final playtest, someone suggested the ability to 'save a topping for later.' This is something I had considered for a while and because someone specifically called it out, I decided to try and add it. It ended up being a great idea because it adds another level of player choice and strategy to the game. Do you save a Wildcard or Bomb just in case? Or do you hang on to a Butter to refill the Hunger Meter in a pinch?
Players also suggested moving toppings around after placing them. I initially felt this broke the core mechanic, but after I added it to the game, it was wildly more fun! Sure, the Bomb's purpose is diminished, but the amount of player freedom and depth of strategy that is gained was definitely worth the change. The Bomb is still there mostly because it is just really fun to blow stuff up!
Since this game's goal is simple – get a high score, I wanted to have some sort of leaderboards and achievements to ad depth and re-playability. Thus, I integrated OpenFeint to provide these services!
Also, if anybody is wondering why I included a pepper that makes the queen breath fire, it's purely because it was cool to have her breath fire!
Design
Waffle Queen was developed using pure Objective-C in Xcode. The game engine is an open source engine called Cocos2D which had all of the features necessary for my game. During development, I had to dig into the engine code itself a few times and fix bugs in order to ship…hooray open source!
The art pipeline was very straightforward. Whitney built assets in Photoshop and used a 3rd party tool called Zwoptex to build sprite atlases. These atlas files were then setup in Objective-C as sprite animations that could be triggered when appropriate.
The particle system is also built into Cocos2D and we used a 3rd party tool called particle Designer which enabled us to rapidly prototype and preview particles that were exported as a particle file and a particle texture (if needed).
Gameplay was achieved through a series of touch detections on game objects, game sequences, events, and timers for features such as the Hunger Meter. Since our art budget was so tight, I had to animate a few things in code such as the gentle rocking of the toppings as they move across the conveyor belt. The conveyor belt itself is just an OpenGL GL_REPEAT texture, which thankfully, the fixed-function rendering pipeline of the iPhone hardware allows to work.
Sound Design
I spent a significant amount of time on sound design for this game. Being a former music major, I know how important audio is to get the feel of a game just right. After spending well over 30 hours searching for stock music for the main game, I decided to compose it myself over the course of two days. For the main title, I used stock music that was acceptable. Many of the sound effects in the game came from Freesounds.org but I used Audacity to edit and blend them. Some of the sounds, such as the selecting and placing of a topping, are just me doing foley work with my iPhone as the recording device and my mouth making sound effects!