Author: Sam Baeseman
Inspiration
How did Grape Juice City come to be? Our original concept drew on colorful and playful platformers such as Super Mario Sunshine, cartoonish team-based shooters such as the Splatoon series, and South American styles of music such as Bossa Nova and Samba. It was key to combine these inspirations into a flashy and entertaining pitch for a project that would be both fun to make, and fun to play, using these references to ensure total thematic cohesion throughout the process of making this game.
Parameters
It wasn’t until the night before the date of our initial pitches that the idea of a competitive game was considered. Since then, it has been developed solely as a team-based looter shooter. This decision was made primarily because of the looming scope concerns of creating a game in only two semesters’ time and due to the desired end experience of this game. Knowing that most players at SGX would likely be unable to dedicate upwards of five minutes of in-depth playtime and mechanics, we instead opted for a casual, intuitive, and replayable gaming experience.
With all this in mind, we determined that our game needed three qualities to be as successful as possible. First, it needed to be Juicy and Colorful to catch people’s attention and give developers eye catching work for their portfolios. Second, it needed to be Playfully Competitive to engage with a wide range of potential players without requiring too much onboarding. Third, we needed to make it Fast and Busy, with timed rounds, crowded streets, and UI that conveys information to the player as quickly and efficiently as possible. These became our design pillars which we used to design the rest of our game.
Development
As we began the first stages of developing this game, we went back and forth on various approaches to producing the level and desired effects, combing through other successful games, and studying what techniques they made use of to produce theirs. We selected Unity as our engine of choice due to its flexibility with working on both desktop and laptop devices. This allowed us to iterate collaboratively, but still run playtests on stronger devices as needed.
We ran into a couple of crossroads regarding how we wanted to develop our game and what game mechanics took priority when combined with our game’s theme. We simplified all our player’s interactions with the world down to kicking. We did this to provide a clear and intuitive solution for our cartoonish game world, and this only further inspired our team towards amazing animations and other special effects, further on down the line. We also took our idea of teams of different fruit brands further, developing them to have distinct personality traits, giving each team a different brand identity. This influenced our visual design, and how we would later choose to advertise our game, even going so far as to create a personality quiz for which team people would fit best!
Blog post written by Sam Baeseman
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