Inkky

Inkky is an action platformer wherein you change your color at various points to navigate the world to save the world inside a doodle book.

Role

Generalist Programmer

Engine

Unity

Platform

Android

Development Time

3 Months (September, 2021 - November, 2021)

Team Size

6 People

Game Trailer

Game Mechanics

Color Changing

The player can change the main character’s (Inkky) color. This can be done by:

First picking up an ink well with the new ink color
A new button named “Cycle Colors” will pop up.
An animation will be played while the character’s color changes

The player now will be a different color. The player can now interact with white colored objects, and objects with the same color as the current color of the character.

Ball Bouncing

The player can bounce while in the ball form by using the Bounce button show on the lower right side of the screen.

The bounce works as follows:

If the player hits the bounce button while at the peak of the movement, they will slam with a force boosted to 150%, enabling them to jump higher at a faster rate.

If the player hits the bounce button at any other point of the movement they will bounce with the normal bounce force.

Enemy Turning

The enemies of the game represent a threat that can be mitigated.

All enemies of the game are from a specific color, and they can be turned into friendly NPCs when the player jumps on top of them, while being the same color as the enemies.
If they're different colors the enemy will cast red “energy” towards the player and pushes the player away.

Enemy Turning

This is optional, used for storytelling. Scattered throughout the levels there are several books that interact with the player when touched.
A window will pop up with some text describing the story of Inkky, and the icons of the secrets is updated on the top left screen of the game.

Responsibilities

Create and maintain efficient game’s code base
Assess the technical scope of the game
Develop game assets that fulfill the rest of the development team’s needs
Work closely with artists and level designers
Perform testing
Perform integration testing
Document game technical design specifications

Post Mortem

What went well:

Team onboarding was successful
Ambitious goal for physics that were fulfilled
Cutting aspects of project that were out of scope.
Deep discussions by level designers before coming to final decisions
Cross-discipline communication went well
No crunch
Holding members accountable for task completion
Low stress work environment

What went wrong

Some gameplay moments were fine-tuned, but not nearly enough for delivering the best game feeling to the player.
Overflowing tasks for programmers
Scrum board management and task details
Spaghetti code
Ball character movement was tricky to perfect
Unplanned tasks were generated mid-sprint
Not enough playtesting early on

What we learned

How to join a team effectively and rapidly with an ongoing structure and development process, to work and create value as soon as possible.
Consistent and sufficient communication skills to convey to the rest of team what was being done, and what was possible in terms of development.
Technical skills using Unity
Validation of art assets
Estimating the scope of a game
There’s never enough time