So it finally happened.

When we first started working on this video game I was not sure that we would be able to finish it. There are so many things that can cause a game to be cancelled, but here we are. In the last post I described how we had finished working out how we wanted our environment artwork to move on-screen to give the feeling of forward momentum but we ran into another large problem.

When all of the artwork, for the first level, was finished we looked at the size of our game it saw that it was over 300mb. This meant that our art work files were too big and if we continued this way our game would be over 1gb if we added in additional levels. This had to be changed because nobody would want to download an endless runner that was over 1gb.

The solution, that we selected, was to completely scrap the art style and completely redo all of the artwork in pixel art. All of the art assets for the first level were replaced with much smaller, and in my opinion better looking, pixel art files. None of the mechanics had to be changed, but because of the smaller sprite sizes we did have to adjust some of the values that were put into the games physics to make the movement feel the same as it did previously.

An unexpected benefit to the change in art style was that we were able to produce the pixel art much faster than we were able to with the hand drawn artwork. This allowed us to rapidly finish multiple levels of the game, and since most of the scripting was done, we dropped sprites into game objects and a nearly finished game showed up in front of us.

After the levels were built, and the level specific mechanics were working, we needed to build the rest of the features that people would expect from a finished game. We went to work building an options screen, a tutorial, a main menu, a system to save user data.

Quite possibly the most challenging feature to add was with achievement system. Originally we wanted to use Google Play for the achievements exclusively. Google Play was cross-platform, and there was a unity3d plugin, this way the players on iOS would be able to have the exact same leaderboard as the players on Android. Unfortunately, close to the very end of development, Google sunset the Google Play achievements for iOS, which meant that the month before we launched, we had to scramble to get Game Centre working in the iOS version of our game.

Thankfully, we managed to overcome every single roadblock or obstacle that we ran into. This was a very challenging project but after 2 years of development I am proud to say that Project: Blue has been released and is available for iOS and Android through the App Store and Google Play. You can check out its trailer here.

This game would not have been possible if not for the hard work done by Ryan Cooper, David Sokolowski and Aaron Sokolowski and I would like to personally thank them for their involvement with this game.

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