Our second game Balloon Guru is now available on the AppStore and Google Play!
During the fall of 2016 we finished the final level of our first game Tick Tock Toad and also created an ad which we tried out using UnityAds (you can read more about that here). We were finally at a place where we could start to look ahead at what our next project would be.
We went away for a weekend when we first started the company to brainstorm game ideas so we went back to the results of that weekend and started looking at the different game ideas to see which one would be a fun project to take on next.
Our process when brainstorming game ideas was to write down random words on small pieces of paper and then picking two at random. Then we gave it 10 minutes to try to see what kind of game idea those two words together would trigger for us. Simple, yes. Genius, yes. At least we thought so. 
Of those ideas we felt drawn to one in particular. The words were “Balloon” and “High”. Actually we kind of had already picked that as our next game almost a year earlier. We had a workshop after christmas of 2015 when we worked out a MVP for the game. So we started with revisiting the results of the workshop and started working on the game in the middle of November of 2016.
We learned a great deal from creating our first game Tick Tock Toad. We knew what to do but most of all we knew what not to do.
A few key things we wanted to achieve with this game:
- Facebook integeration and leaderboards. We wanted to get people to see their friends on Facebook on a leaderboard to trigger some competition among friends.
- Smaller MonoBehavoirs with specific tasks instead of big ones. This way it is easier to troubleshoot and reuse code elsewhere. A single game object might have 10 MonoBehavoirs attached to it instead of 1. If we want to remove some functionality from the object we can just remove that MonoBehavoirs instead of rewriting one big MonoBehavoir.
- Less content heavy game. Our first game was very content heavy which meant it was pretty costly for us to add levels and features. We wanted to create reusable content which would allow us to produce the game faster.
- No tutorials (almost). The game and the user interface should be straightforward and easy to understand without having someone explain the game to you.
- Test it on people early. Our first game was tested by someone outside of the development team for the first time after 3 months of development. When we finally got feedback we found out that a lot of what we thought was easy to understand really was not. This time we went 3 days until someone first tried out the game.
- Shorter development time and smaller first version of the game. This way we can see how well the game is received and if there is any point in developing it any further.
Of these things we wanted to achieve we’re happy to say the we managed to pull all of them off! We released the first version of the game in the end of June of 2017. We haven’t worked full time with this project during this time though. We estimate that we have spent about 2 months full time for two developers and 1 month work for our graphics designer. On Tick Tock Toad we spent 6 months full time before we release the first version so this is a great improvement we think!
It has been great fun to create our second game, Balloon Guru, and we hope you enjoy it! We have some ideas on how to expand and improve the game of course and we are planning on releasing more content for the game during the fall of 2017. If you have any ideas of what to change or add please feel free to let us know in the comments!
The game is developed in Unity with C# as the scripting language. Graphics is made in Adobe Illustrator, sound effects were made in Audacity and music is made in Logic.
We are grateful as always for the music in the game created by Erik Rydmark at songshaper.se!
Get The app
