2D Game development case study

An interesting opportunity to try something different!

Something a bit out of the ordinary came our way in October, an enquiry about building a website containing a couple of 2D games for a research project. The premise was to take some games or activities that were currently being done physically and make them digital, to streamline the process of running research projects with children in early learning centers.

Many software engineers get into programming to build games and that was true of Jamie but that was not true of me, so this would be an opportunity to try something new!

Armed with some excellent design mockups and Phaser 3, a JavaScript game framework, I implemented the first versions of Apple Catcher.

Close collaboration with the customer over several rounds of iterative demoing and feedback clarified some requirements and resulted in small changes to improve the ease of use, as well as improving the data captured for later analysis purposes.

The lessons learned and experience gained building Apple Catcher allowed me to much more quickly implement Bricks Shape, and I managed to bring the project to a conclusion ahead of time and on budget!

The customer was keen to host the site using Github Pages so I set that up and you can see it (and try out the games!) here.

This project was funded by a New Zealand Product Accelerator Project Grant and will be used for research at the University of Auckland Centre for Developmental Science; I look forward to hearing about the outcomes!

Contact us via email (info@iontech.nz) or phone (09 553 3057) if you have a similar project in mind!