Mini Mages
About
"Mini Mages" is a game for the iOS platform. The product runs on an iPad and one to four iPhones or iPod touches that are networked together via Bluetooth. Each player uses a personal iPhone or iPod to play around a central iPad. Specifically, Mini Mages is a game themed as a "tournament of wizards." Each player takes on the persona of a wizard and takes turns choosing from a series of mini-games to compete in. Winning a mini-game gives the player "points," and when one player gains five points, they win the overall game.
For this project, we were able to design and create three mini-games. The first, Summon, is based around "Rock-Paper-Scissors." Each player chooses which rock, paper, or scissor monster they want to summon before a timer completes. Then, an evil wizard in the center chooses his own monster and each player pits their choice against his. The game continues in rounds until one player remains. Our second game, "Potions," is similar to the classic "Simon." First, each player watches as a series of potion "ingredients" appear on the iPad. Then, they hold open the cauldron on the iPad with their finger and use the other hand to select ingredients and physically pour them into the pot. A player wins if they select the ingredients in the correct order. Once again, this game continues in rounds of increasing difficulty (more ingredients, or less time) until one player remains. Finally, "Dragon Battle" uses the iPhones as steering wheels to control their dragon on the iPad. The player can shoot fireballs and must attempt to hit other players and defeat them. Small fireballs also float across the iPad, and pressing one explodes a bomb, damaging nearby players. The last player alive wins.
"Mini Mages" was created as a senior design capstone project in Spring of 2011. The class required our team of five to create a product based on the needs of a client. Our client, a local startup iPhone app developer, requested a game. The game's requirements were that it must connect 1 to 4 players on iPhones to an iPad with all players situated around the iPad, using it as a console. The client wanted to use the game as a prototype to display to potential clients as a way of showcasing the features of the systems. The game was developed in the Unity 3D engine over about 4 months.
The game was created by Wes Anderson, Joseph Maliksi, Rose Peng, Robert Spessard, and myself.
Contributions
Programming
As a programmer, I created most of the elements for the "non-game" scenes/components - including creating the connection scene, overworld, and win scene. This also included adding scoring into each of the games and displaying player's details on their screens, creating a system for round-robin game picking, animating a win state and integrating much of the UI throughout the game.
Design
My main role for the project was to lead the design process by making final decisions on the flow and style of our game. Game design was a group process that involved the creation of the overall game idea to fit our client's expectations (a 4-player concept game connecting the iPhone and iPad), as well as the individual mini-games (each of which was made to showcase the abilities of the iPhone/iPad).