How prototyping saved our game

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Introduction

Elephant Mouse (www.elephantmouse.com) is a mobile game development studio proudly located in the Research Triangle of Raleigh, North Carolina, a hotbed of tech innovation, game development, and tasty BBQ. EM veterans hail from the likes of Activision, Ubisoft, EA, Playdom, Zynga, and other industry giants. Weve released several highly-rated mobile titles, including Star Trek Rivals, The Godfather Slots, Lil Birds, and Archetype.

Robots Need Love Too is our new game that will be launching in September. A lite version is currently available in the Canadian App Store. If you are in Canada, please give it a try and let us know what you think!

The Setup for our New Game

We wanted to create a fun new puzzle game for mobile devices, and we wanted to target a casual audience who enjoy indie games. The entire team was invited to pitch concepts and prototypes, and we brainstormed tons of concepts.

One of the programmers created a playable prototype in Unity about robots in love. It was a side-view physics puzzler where the player tried to get two robots to meet. Though we liked the concept, we wanted to move away from physics-based games (because we thought that would be a lot of work for our small team). We kept the idea of robots, how they meet up at the end of each level, and the game name - Robots Need Love Too.

We focused on the mechanic of setting up actions, then activating the sequence to see what happens. Then our designer fleshed out some initial mechanics involving directional arrows. The whole concept was structured around a narrative of forbidden love (the best kind).

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How prototyping saved our game