Panda Punch Party is a demo of an end-less runner mobile game inspired by games such as Jetpack Joyride that follows a cute panda fighting to save their bamboo forest home from deforestation. My main goal for the project was to learn about the UI creation pipeline of games through research and practice. To see my process, keep scrolling!
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GOAL
Explore UI asset creation and implementation for games, possibly discovering industry standard pipelines.
TASKS
Design a simple game to act as an environment for UI creation.
CHALLENGES
Limited coding experience and working alone. I’m used to working in teams, so this was out of my comfort zone.
SOLUTION
A demo endless runner game featuring a cute theme to base UI designs off of.
RESEARCH
COMPETITIVE AUDIT
Comparing current endless runner mobile games on the app store to understand controls, accessibility features, and user flow while browsing the game.
GAME UX PIPELINE
Reading articles and books providing insight into specifically game UX, how it is similar and different to product-based UX.
GAME ui RESEARCH
Designing user-interfaces is what I am familiar, but implementing is more of a challenge. Using several free sources from the internet, I prioritized dedicating time to learning Unity’s UI system.
CONCEPT
Gameplay
Based off the competitive audit, the majority of endless runners had two to three actions a player can do progress. I settled for “jump” and “punch” while the player continuously moves forward. I considered rhythm and adventure based, but for this project I wanted to focus on implementation rather than story or music.
CHARACTER CONCEPTS
UI CONCEPTS
Initially, I wanted the style to reflect a cartoony style, similar to other games on the market. However, I played with some other lineless styles along with testing line-weight variations
PROTOTYPING
During this stage, I focused on interaction and animation–what would the game feel like when interacted with? I loved the idea of the camera moving through the environment, allowing players to immerse themselves in the world outside of the main play environment.
PRODUCTION
SPRITES
Player
Ground Enemy
Flying Enemy
UI Sheet
These were the main sprites that were implemented in the demo. I underestimated the time it took to learn more about coding and animating using tweening, however the end result ended up looking very clean!
BACKGROUNDS
I noticed in my competitive audit that there were some screens that felt more “alive” then others, the majority of these dead screens being taken up by UI. Most of these was due to a lack of background or animated sprites. The image here shows three backgrounds of the game, each separated into parallaxing layers to have always something be moving on the screen, deterring life-less screens.
DEMO
Originally, the demo was meant for mobile. However, for a better gaming experience, I made controls for keyboard and mouse since my main audience will be playing from itch.io.
CONCLUSION
Panda Punch Party was an absolute blast to work on. I advanced my coding skills in C#, specifically when implementing UI, and better understand the sketch to sprite pipeline for games!
