Exercise to develope and promote a simple mobile game

In an effort to understand what is involved in developing a mobile game and get it noticed I decided to try out developing a small game.

I hope to document all my efforts, mistakes, challenges and solutions. The main idea of the first little game is to understand what's involved and to learn from the whole process. Perhaps it will lead on to developing and promoting a better game in the future, but for now, the idea is for a trial run of the complete process. Add some polish to a simple game idea, and lets see how it goes.

When I first got into Unity3D one of my early projects was converting an old DirectX 9 VB.net game into Unity3D. That process helped me find my way around Unity3D and get up to speed with C# (the superior Unity3D supported language).

That early project was a 2D grid based puzzle game called Repton Returns. As based on the 8-bit classic Repton (like Bouder-dash). However I wanted to focus on an even more simplified game for the process of learning mobile games development, and so I chose the Sokoban transform puzzle game. I enjoyed playing the little Windows version of this genre named Boxworld, and thought it was simple yet interesting enough for the exercise.

However, of course it had to be one up from some of the Sokoban games that can be found already on the store, I noticed most of them faired poorly in terms of graphics and presentation. I guess its not critical for this type of game, but making the graphics 3D seemed an attractive direction to turn.

So using the now re-factored Repton code to manage loading in a 2D grid level, and moving objects about within such levels, it didn't take long at all to derive a basic prototype of the game in motion.