New Release
by Emre Ünal-Creating The idea
We had this idea of consuming some items on the screen with an easy input, as easy as possible like a single tap&hold mechanic but some parts were missing in the idea. We have made a brainstorming session with the Blay team as Zoomzo Games members. In the brainstorming session, we have talked about lots of different ideas, how to implement them, how to execute things better and everyone shared their ideas. Tried to fill the gaps and after a 5-hour meeting with the design team, we had the basic mechanic on our mind and a concept of the game idea. The idea itself was unique but to improve the idea, mechanics and visuals had to be perfect! Therefore we have implemented 3 different gameplays for the players and created even many more to clear the imperfections.
-Intervention timely
Each week we had these meetings where we discuss the game idea, mechanics, visuals, game feeling of the product we are working on, and once we detect a delusion we made sure to take a note and fix the issue properly as soon as possible. At the same time, we make sure of having these fixes promptly. Sometimes, instead of making a huge fix later maybe you should make some hotfixes and it will help you execute better performance across the project.
-Monetization key points
Making games is not a job but a passion for us however it has to be the income source for our life so we can move on. On the idea phase (brainstorming sessions) do not forget to take notes about where and how to get some revenue from the player. I hate when I come across an advertisement while playing the game and we do not want to make these kinds of ads for the revenue too.
What we can do is, rewarding the player once they watch an advertisement and this is the way we like to thank our players because we believe players are not some kind of milking cow, we rather think of our players as “guests” who come for a coffee to our shop and we would love them to come back for our fresh coffees as well. Guests who watch ads are the ones who are giving us tips while playing. That’s why we try to ensure that our players are satisfied and entertained after watching an ad. To achieve this goal it would be beneficial to give the player a large amount of power for a while after watching an ad as a reward for their tip.
-The making of the Piranhas Fast&Feast
To understand the challenges we have worked through, you need to understand the game. We are controlling the piranhas. The main characters are piranhas because of that we needed cool piranha models thanks to our 3D Artist that was no problem for us. To give the feeling of controlling the piranhas we have a special camera angle which shows us some parts of the piranhas and we can see many piranhas around, wobbling inside the water. Some god rays are coming from the top of the screen so we know we are a little bit deep in the water but not very deep because we can still see the shining items with the help of the god rays.
-Where to focus?
At first, we thought that would be a good idea to call attention to the pollution in the water but then we decide to give more fun thoughts to players. Instead of focusing on polluted water, we have chosen to focus on the idea of feeding the fishes on some parts of these items people dumped in the water. This would let the player think of the pollution themselves in another way. At least this is what we aim to…
In the first levels, players will be feeding piranhas to many different fully edible things like apple, donut etc… Then you should watch out for the inedible parts.But there was a challenge here, how can we manage to show the player that we are polluting the water without actually polluting it?
We could easily put a plastic bag around an apple and show the pollution inside the game but that was not what we wanted. After a couple of discussions on this topic, we had this great solution where we match shapes with real-life objects. Once we decide on this idea, the rest was lots of googling and finding the same shaped objects with the same shaped edibles. Then we improve this idea by merging the same shaped objects to make it more understandable of edible and inedible parts of the object. We have googled a lot of things before creating the levels and tried to have a visual on our minds so that we can make perfectly understandable levels by the players. I recommend using Pinterest for these searches it is easier for me to focus on some concept in Pinterest other than just using a search engine. It may help you as well. Also, we have fever mode which can be activated by eating the highlighted parts first. Eating the highlighted part unlocks the crazy mode where you will get extra piranhas joining your flock. Then the piranhas will start eating every part of the item quickly as the way piranha flocks do just like in real-life! Here is the market link for the game: https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/piranhas-fast-feast/id1552837564
Don’t forget to comment on how you feel about our game. Thanks for reading and joining us in this journey.
