Solo Project - Published 2021
Surrounded Ship is a solo side project I undertook during my studies at Sheridan College. It’s a mobile title I developed in one year, and later returned to update and improve. My intent was to gain experience and knowledge in publishing a title to the Google Play store.
In this game, players are in the centre of the screen, rotate their ship, and fire cannons at oncoming enemies. After each round, they’re rewarded with gold which they use to upgrade their ship.
The game implements Google Play Games, including achievements, cloud saves, and leaderboards. I also implemented Google’s AdMob to gain experience working with in-game ads.
Process
My goals for this project weren’t specific to any game mechanics, I simply knew that I wanted a simple mobile game with a scope that’s easy to keep in check. So, I started out ideation by writing down a big list of verbs that could make a core mechanic. A few stood out to me, so I explored how they could be fleshed out into a game.
I ended up with ‘rotating’ and ‘defending’ as they led me to this concept where the player stands in the middle of the screen and rotates to defend themselves from oncoming enemies.
Prototype
One of the first things I did was create a prototype to immediately get a feel for how the idea played out.
I developed a quick prototype with cubes and spheres for this purpose.
First Version
I liked where this project was headed, and was eager to apply a coat of paint to it. Since my goals for this project did not include working with visuals, I decided to go with some free assets from Kenney.nl.
This led to the first version of the game. I fleshed it out with a shop to buy upgrades with in-game gold, achievements, cloud save, and other things to make it ready-to-go.
Updated version
After the first release, I continued work on the project to patch up a few bugs and keep things up-to-date.
Over a year later, I decided to go back and apply a second pass on the visuals. While they’re still not anything stellar, I worked a little with Unity’s Shader Graph and developed the game’s UI a little further.
In addition, I included new enemy types, and a couple of bosses. The intention was to introduce some new mechanics for players, and add checkpoints in difficulty that required players to upgrade their ship periodically, rather than inching forward.
