Soul Conductor

Mobile Game Development - bachelor's course - Graded A


Platform

Android

Engine

Unity

Tools used

Unity's: C# scripting, particle system & new input system.
Photoshop, Trello, Discord.

Duration

9 weeks

Team Size

5

Roles

Programming, Design, Particle FX

The game

Soul Conductor is a rather unique rhythm game that mix the rythm game genre with 'Fruit Ninja'. The player is a forest-being called "soul conductor", meant to guide captured souls to freedom. To succeed, you must swipe the souls at the right time to the beat of the music. The goal is to complete the song and help free as many souls as possible before they are forever lost. The game was intended to have a captivating story and eventful gameplay that kept the player engaged. The end product is interesting and fun. We managed to create the core game loop but did not have time to develop any sort of story.

Links

[The Google Play store page]
[Download apk for android here]
[Download for Mac here]
[Download for Windows here]

The Work

Five person group project during my bachelor. Developed in Unity over the course of two months following the agile work method Scrum. All work was done remotely with collaborations and meetings taking place on Discord.

My main role was general programmer and particle artist focusing on gameplay and interaction. I ended up being mainly responsible for:
• Designing & implementing how the touch input was managed and how objects are sliced/swiped.
• Designing & implementing the particle effects.
• The effect of breaking the souls free from a glass bubble.
• Optimizing performance on mobile.
• The store page screens.

I'll talk about some details of these below.

Gameplay

In small groups like this everyone contributes to the initial ideation of the project, however, we were touching on the genre of rythm games and I came up with the idea of mixing the popular mobile game 'Fruit Ninja' with the rythm genre. I made a quick computer prototype (with the help of [Brackeys] ♥) and the team felt the concept was very doable for us.

Proof Of Concept
The university course with which this project was done was teaching a lot about UX and I set as a personal goal to really make the interaction of slicing these things feel good. One of the challenges I faced as a programmer was to minimize the lag of the touch input on mobiles. I learned that mobiles inherently have lag in the touch input, and Unity adds to this as well.
Registered Input Positions
I attempted several things to minimize this: using Unity's new input system, using the 'enhanced touch' version of this new system, raising the capped FPS (FPS is by default capped to 30 FPS by applications to save battery etc.). It helped alleviate some of the lag but I never got down to the same input registration as my own mobile's OS. However, when people were playtesting the game on their own phones they said that they didn't experience any lag.

Visual Effects

To enhance the interactions and its juciness, I tried to implement as many visual effects a possible.

Effects of Swiping the Bubbles
Swiping the trapped spirits is the main thing you as a player is doing, so I wanted good feedback on this. I made the colored circle intentionally minimalistic, with red transparent color when you shouldn't swipe and green opaque when you should. With the decreasing size of the ring indicating the timing of the beats. Heart particles and a text appear when the player is swiping to tell how good the timing was. I made the bubble appear like glass breaking, with a random glass breaking sound playing each time.
Spirits in the Distance
The freed little spirits gets to return to their friends in the forest! ^_^
Song Selection Carousel
The main graphic artist was working on a song selection menu and was struggling to get a carousel implemented in Unity. I helped her off by creating the basics of how the UI should be structured in Unity with a perspective projection to get the buttons to rotate around the tree and coding this rotation effect. So working together we created this nice menu.

Store page screens

I made these [Google Play store page] screenshots in Photoshop from the top of my head and by experimenting with different techniques.

I wanted to capture and purvey the essence of our gameplay with this screen by hightlighting the main gameplay mechanics with a yellow outline and describe it with a text. Sort of taking inspiration from how I feel many other mobile games highlight details in their store page screens.
This screen was to show of one of our features in the game, the score leaderboard. We understood that one of our target groups, the hardcore rythm gamers, want to be able to compete and show of their skills. Showing this off in the store page felt like a good idea.

Below are some early versions of our screens I made into the 3rd week of the project to help guide the vision of the project.

Source Code

[Click here to see source code in GitHub]

Feel free to view my code in the following scripts that I was largely responsible for (use search):

  • Fruit.cs
  • SlicedFruit.cs
  • Blade.cs
  • InputManager.cs
  • PanelController.cs
  • GameManager.cs
  • SceneHandler.cs
  • SingletonPattern.cs
  • InGameMenuController.cs
  • PopupScreenController.cs

Dev Blog

I kept a blog that documented my work process. Unfortunately I wrote it in Swedish and have not had time to re-write it, so it is what it is at the moment.
[Click here to read blog in Google Docs].