Getting into the Game

MobPunks! was the result of the fifth project the Apple Developer Academy offered us. I worked in a fun and unique team of 5, known as the Dream Developers; depicted on the right.

Mobpunks follows a main character working community service in a corrupt, cyberpunk city, fighting off corruption in the form of animals known as Mobpunks, and corrupt corperations.

Challenge Based Learning (Take 5)

As always, to begin, we had to brainstorm using the Apple's CBL method. The lotus ideation method worked best for us, and honestly resulted in some crazy concepts! In the end, however, we narrowed it down to Pokemon x Zelda. Ambitious, right?

With a concept in mind, we rolled into the design phase pretty quickly, and it turned out to be my favorite phase of this challenge.

Design is Fun!

We came into the design phase knowing we wanted something urban yet cyberpunk, and we ended up rocketing forward with this concept. Jacob did an absolutely stellar job as the lead designer, coming out with some insane designs, and I ended up doing a lot of the UI elements, even though I was meant to be coding. It was a group effort, and we ended up spending a lot of time on this part. Maybe even too much time (forshadowing).

Coding, however...

So I was the lead coder for this challenge, and I jumped into it with all the enthusiam I could muster! However, roadblocks became really obvious early on. I was able to get a basic fight UI working (go me!), but there were some moments where life decided to humble me. For what it's worth, there is not very much documentation on how to do a game like this in the iOS environment. Funny as it is, I actually found one of the best references I could have found after the challenge was over. Kodeco is a funny site. With all that being said, I still was able to deliver something, and I have a ton of pride in that. 8 weeks is definitely not enough time for a full game, but this is one of those projects that you pick back up later on. I definitely will be doing that!

Sprinting Through the Finish Line

The deliverable for this project was to get the game onto TestFlight, and we were able to reach that goal!

We also ended up presenting to the Apple Arcade team as part of the deliverable as well. The team really loved our concept and frankly, I love it too. I hope we will be able to make this game into a reality in the future!