#backyardsnowdown

With Frankenfruit Studio’s maiden voyage into the vast world of Game Design, we have finally hit Beta and are on the last 2 weeks of polish. 

Touching up our models, having fun with our Jumping Snowman (Don’t worry, he jumps much slower in game...don’t want him to get tired...) and our Level Design is primarily:

Frankenfruit Studio’s game, Backyard Snowdown, has hit the Gold Milestone. It “releases” today. 

Frankenfruit Studio’s Backyard Snowdown has finally hit “release”, after months this game has been in the making by our small student team at AIE Melbourne since September. 

This Game Trailer has been made to reflect the theme of the game and shows off the gameplay as it is at the Gold Milestone.

(Credit to https://incompetech.com/ for the music)

A huge thank you...

...to everyone in my team during this process. @hamishsmithers​ as my fellow designer, @Mitchell_C_S and @nerbzthedude my programmers, and please take a look at some of my artists’ work:

https://sketchfab.com/condello.art

https://www.artstation.com/condello_art

Backyard Snowdown is well underway, our programmers have not stopped to get as much in the game as possible before we hit Beta. Which is great! We now have a fully playable and (dare I say) fun game to work on. 

Main Mechanics:

The most important aspect to Backyard Snowdown is the snowballs. They can be thrown directly at the other players to inflict damage, or (and don’t ask for the logic) they can ricochet off anything except other players to hit their mark.

1 week to go and with Bug Fixing consuming most of our energy, it’s nice to sit back and look at how far we’ve come.

Alpha:

Gold:

As a team, we started polishing earlier than we needed to meaning the whole team has played the game as much as possible and the game has only changed for the better immensely.

From the start of development, it has been really important to have an inclusive roster of characters. Initially sitting on the idea of 4-8 (depending on scope) selectable characters. That was then changed to basic character models that could be customised with hats, gender and skin tone. After feedback from our first presentation to a Teacher Panel, we went back to selectable characters.

Rolling with that we now have 4 adorable and quirky characters, 2 male and 2 female (gender equality has been really important from the start). Here is the first one, looking to be ready for Alpha!

Making a Sell Sheet for our game was...interesting. Featuring such challenges as; paper shortages, formatting details taking hours longer than anticipated, and somehow 2 A5 PDfs not being the same size when it came to printing...

Lesson of the Day - Don’t be afraid to think outside the box, a Sell Sheet doesn’t have to be a sheet of paper.