Development Series #2 covers how we incorporated a background story to give more meaningful gameplay and share sketches of how the environment and robot would look. We also share a gameplay video of a build which incorporated levels, orb collection, and various colored orbs.

Posted by FreakoutGames on Feb 23rd, 2018

Welcome to our 2nd devlog article about our upcoming casual arcade based mobile game Solbot:Energy Rush. Through series of articles we would like to share our experience of how this game evolved, the development progress/phases, working remotely from different locations as a team and much more.

In the last post, we discussed how we designed and tested the game. We built a prototype to help test concepts and to test if player's would enjoy playing the game. Once we got the initial documentation completed we had our writer brainstorm ideas on possible background stories to give more meaning to gameplay. We wanted to answer questions such as, “Why are they collecting these orbs? What are the orbs being used for?” He came up with a few ideas:

1. Robot/Future Theme

2. Bird/Fruit Theme

3. Hummingbird/Bee/Butterfly/Garden Theme

With the Robot/Future theme, our designer thought that would be a good fit. The orbs could be "renewable energy" and the player can collect that to help power a city. The robot could have been built by the company that is harnessing the energy for the city. This concept ended up being changed, which we can talk about in our next post.

During this phase we also had an artist draw sketches for the robot, gates, and city. You can see the initial concept sketches below:

In this sketch the artist was flushing out ideas on how the city can look like and a study on the robot.

Sketch explores how gates could look like in the game.

Later during the development process we ended up going with a more simplified robot design, which is shown below.

Along with sketching the environments and robot we started working on incorporating other colors for energy and building levels, along with counting orbs collected.

In the next post we will share more about our development progress, so stay tuned!

It would be really great if you can support us by getting connected on Twitter: Twitter.com