Pikdot

A casual game developed for mobile

Solo Project

Roles on Project: Mobile Developer

Pikdot was a solo project that I developed on my own throughout January and February of 2024. I had prior experience developing a mobile game through my past project AWIC: Breaking Ground, however, I was not involved with the distribution and release of the final app, and so I wanted to learn the pipeline for doing so. I gave myself around a month to design, prototype and develop a game with the intention of releasing it on the App Store and Google Play Store.

I have so far been successful in releasing Pikdot on the App Store and have also created a version of a game that runs in a browser and on Windows. I am in the process of closed testing in order to get Pikdot on the Google Play Store. Nonetheless, I found it interesting to see what was involved with publishing a game to those stores, which is useful knowledge going forward in other projects I work on.

 My Process

Early Concept Work

My primary goal with this project was to gain experience in releasing a mobile game on one of the two main app stores (Apple App Store and Google Play Store). With only about a month to develop the game, I wanted to keep the game and its interactions simple.

I came up with a concept where in order to gain points, the player would need to tap or avoid tapping nine circles based on their colours. Green circles gave points although the amount gained decreased over time, yellow circles also gain points although the amount gained increases over time, red circles deduct points although the amount they deduct decreases over time. There are also special circles which include the blue circle which is similar to the green circle, although also activates circles adjacent to it, and purple circles which when tapped, allows the player to regain health (as the player also lost health when clicking red circles). After a circle reaches its lowest/highest value or has been around for a long enough, the circle will disappear and will be replaced with a circle of another colour.

Early Prototype Work

I begun to prototype this initial concept for PC in Unity. I quickly found, however, that the numbers on these circles complicated the game and made the game hard to follow. I was able to get the intended effect of having the player click green circles quickly, however, whenever red circles appeared, players would just wait for it to disappear or click on other circles in the mean time. As a result, the player very rarely lost points and health, and so they wouldn't lose the game.

Prototype Refinement Work

I reworked the prototype, starting by removing the numbers present on the circles all together and tweaking what each of the circles did slightly. Green circles would award a point when tapped, yellow circles would award no points, red circles would deduct a point when tapped, blue circles awarded a point but also activate adjacent circles, and purple circle adds a score multiplier which multiplies the amount of points gained or deducted by tapping the other types of circles. This multiplier is reset back to 1 if the player taps a yellow or red circle.

To create the intended effect of having the player tap circles as fast as possible, I added a health bar that decreases over time. If the health bar depletes completely, the game session ends. To keep it from depleting completely, the player needs to tap green and blue circles to increase the health bar amount. If the player taps red circles, however, the bar depletes further. 

As the circles no longer have numbers on them to indicate how long before they disappear and change to another circle, the player is incentivised to tap circle as soon as they appear. Because of this, they are more prone to slipping up and accidentally tapping yellow and red circles, adding further time pressure to the player and creating a more feasible lose condition for the game.

Porting To Mobile

After testing this PC prototype and finding that I found the reworks to provide a much better player experience, I then adapted the game to work with different mobile screen resolutions. This process didn't take too long as my experience making the mobile version of AWIC: Breaking Ground along with how few elements there are on-screen meant I already was familiar with what was involved.

Publishing Pikdot

After some further refinement and playtesting of the game, I released the game on the Apple App Store for IOS, and itch.io for browser and Windows. Aside from the lengthy process it took for me to enrol in the Apple Developer Program, I found the process of publishing my game to the App Store quite smooth. Along with the required promotional images, I was just required to create and validate the build of my game through XCode, which I was able to do through my Mac, as well as provide a privacy policy for Pikdot.

I have also been able to prepare a build of the game for Android with the intent of releasing it on the Google Play Store. the release process is similar, however, for quality assurance, Google requires you to playtest a closed production version of your game with 20 users over a two-week period before being allowed to release the game publicly. I was unable to secure the required amount of playtesters for that duration before returning to university for my final year and research assistant work, however, I plan to conduct this testing at the conclusion of 2024, or the beginning of 2025.