Get Low, Grandpa!

What's stopping this grandpa from going to the party? The answer: nothing. Old age and old bones never kept this grandpa from partying! Help grandpa escape the retirement home, dodge nurses, set off fireworks, and slide his way to the big party in this endless runner!

       Let me quickly walk you through the development process for this game, if you are interested.

Conception:

       1. We first figured out the genre(endless runner) and target audience(fast-paced, mobile users) for the game. And then we focused on the experience goals or the emotions(light-hearted, goofy yet semi-intense as the nature of endless runner) we wanted the game to deliver.

       2. We then looked for "comps" for our game which are already successful games on the market so that we could learn from them. Having good comps is really helpful for our later production phase. The comps for this game are Jetpack Joyride and Cookie Run: OvenBreak .

Jetpack Joyride

Cookie Run: OvenBreak

       3. At the last stage of the concepting, we built a story that fits our game and then start producing concept arts(all credits to our talented artists) and making dirty build for the game.

------ Here are some concept arts for Get Low, Grandpa! ------

Concept Art - Nursing House 1

Concept Art - Nursing House 2

Concept Art - City

Concept Art - City With Color

Concept Art - Grandpa 1

Concept Art - Grandpa 2

Concept Art - Obstacle_Nurse

Concept Art - Obstacle_Patient

Production:

     1. We used Kanban Board methodology as our development methodology. We would have daily group meeting and each member would be assigned with tasks. Code review would be held every Friday and we built twice a week including one stable build at the end of the week.

       2. Playtesting is a great way for us to get feedback from players and each week after the stable build we would look for playtesters for feedback.

5th Graders Playtesing Our Game

Dirty build vs. Early production build

       3. And of course, in this phase, we made a lot of importnat decisions and new changes for the game. We completed four different scenes with different obstacles, introduced new mechanics, made brand new UI, in-game shop, weather system, various power-ups and more.

Coin Configuration Design

Launching:

1. This game was scheduled to be released on August 10th. There were still a lot of things and features that we wanted add to the game, however, done is done. The main focus would be polishing the game and no new features were added.

Boogie Time is Ready

2. The last-week grind was real for programmers, but luckily, the game was successfully released.

3. The game has now been passed to the next group for future updates.

4. For me, the journey of "Get Low, Grandpa!" ends here.

The end ?

A new start ✓

      "Get Low, Grandpa!" is done in two months. Our team went through a complete game development cycle from concepting on Day 1 all the way to final release on mobile platforms. I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to work with all my talented team members. Every member on the team did their job professionally and without them I could never pull this off. Game development is a team coorporation process, knowing how to work with other people is crucial to the success of the game.

      No doubt, Game development is hard. It requires skills, passion, dedication, and sometimes a bit of luck. However, I have never douted the potential of interacitve video games and I have always believed that video games are more than just entertainments. With the right execution, games could become art.