PRODUCTION
I designed and developed Brighter alone in about two weeks using Unity. The main musical theme for the game was licensed through Creative Commons from p0ss.
THE GAME
Brighter is a mobile game that sees the player having to defend themselves from an endless barrage of enemies coming their way. The game was designed around the pleasant and empowering kinetic concept of having to keep all your "attacks" charged, just to then fire them at the right moment. In this regard, it can be considered a cross between a spinning plates game and something along the lines of an endless runner.
DESIGNER'S COMMENTARY
Brighter was my first solo attempt at making something commercially viable and my first game made in Unity. All and all the game is not as bad as it could have been but the polish definitely suffered from my then-inexperience with the engine.
While I still stand behind the core mechanic being solid, the main feedback I received from players was them not really understanding what the numbers on screen were about. The numbers were initially added as a visual signifier of how much a block was charged (originally that was meant to be only represented by the block’s colour, but I felt numbers could have helped colourblind people), but thanks to this experience I now learned that adding redundant information is not necessarily a good way to ensure conveyance, especially when such information is communicated through a vaguely hostile medium (for the casual player) like context-less numbers.
Another problem that the game had was being way too slow at the beginning, which was a deliberate choice to make people slowly understand the mechanics, but in retrospect it would have definitely been more enjoyable with some sort of Jetpack-Joyride-y boost mechanic, to help the experienced players get quicker to the challenging part of the game.
The one thing that worked in the game has to be the physical kinaesthetics of it. When developing Brighter I focused a lot on imagining the movement of the player's fingers, making sure that, rather than watching cool things happen, the player would instead have been doing cool movements with their fingers. I feel that the mix of lane defense and spinning plates accomplished that, as filling up the lanes after shooting squares is an engaged and kinetically unique movement.
RECEPTION
The free version of Brighter currently has a rating of 4.59 out of 5 on the Google Play Store ratings
The premium version of Brighter currently has a rating of 5 out of 5 on the Google Play Store ratings
