When?

11.2021 - 02.2022

What?

GUI design, game design

With?

Team of 2

Weblink

Google Play Store link will be available after release

Fortitude: A Chest Quest is a casual guessing game for Android devices, which has been inspired by well-known classics like Battleship and Minesweeper. It can be played alone or with a friend on the same device.

The goal is to hunt for treasures on a screen-filling grid. To do this, the players take turns placing buoys on the grid cells. These buoys give numeric hints about the locations of the treasures. The players need to interpret the hints and excavate the treasures before they run out of buoys. Each treasure is worth a certain amount of gold (points) and a highscore is saved for every map.

During the development, I was responsible for the game rules and gameplay scripting as well as GUI/UX design, while a colleague provided additional graphics, 3D models and map design for the game world.

Goals and Challenges

The goal of our project was to develop a fun application for the casual gamer, based on an initial game idea. It should be easily accessible and motivating enough to invite the players for a quick game on the bus or in the doctor's waiting room. With this premise set, the detailed goals were defined as follows:

• To develop a finished touch UI with an enjoyable UX starting from scratch, based only on an initial game idea.
• To implement a singleplayer as well as a two-player mode.
• To experience the whole game development pipeline, from the early concept phase to QA and release.

Following these goals and going through the whole process of game development for the first time completely on our own, we encountered quite a few challenges along the way. Most notably were the amount of content needed as well as the implementation of the 2-player mode and the Google Play store release process. Further questions centered around playtesting on different mobile devices and monetarization.

Solutions

The project was realized using the Unreal Engine 4, as Epic's Game Engine provides very good mobile development tools. The gameplay core was created in a game jam like manner, where we developed a quick-and-dirty prototype in two consecutive days to be able to test the essential game idea in a small user study.

The rest of the game was developed and the core experience was refined during the following months, also incorporating our findings during the user tests. Swipe gestures and page indicators were implemented in the level select screen for a more familiar, mobile-friendly UX, different buoy types were added to add strategic variety and the overall look-and-feel was pushed more towards a cartoony and casual style. We also opted for a banner ad based monetarization model.

Due to limited time and manpower, priorization forced us to do some cuts on our initial plans: The two-player mode was downgraded to be playable on a single device only, with the option to expand it to a QuizClash like server-based game mode in the future. Where needed, additional graphical content was licensed from the Unreal Marketplace.

The application is currently in the release phase and will soon be available on the Google Play store.