Thomas Sentier
In the Garden of Dandelions
In the Garden of Dandelions
Summary
Right after getting my Bachelor at the Mediadesign Hochschule München the company Mixtvision got in touch with me about a game for iOS and Android.
The game in question is In the Garden of Dandelions, a story-based endless flyer. The game is based on the similarly named children’s book.
Video
Overview
The first part of the game consists of an interactive story where the player switches between short gameplay and cinematics. In this mode the player is introduced to the story of In the Garden of Dandelions as well as getting to know the gameplay features.
Finishing the Story mode unlocks two new modes. A game-only endless mode and a story-only e-book mode.
The endless flyer is a mode where player can challenge themselves trying to get the highest score possible while the e-book mode allows the player to watch the cinematics without any interaction in-between.
The gameplay is very easy. Touching the screen lifts the player’s character while not touching it makes the character slowly falls down.
By skillfully switching between touching and releasing the screen, the player can gather dandelions in order to increase the score.
Many obstacles come towards the player and have to be dodged. Every contact removes a life from the player and the game is lost once all lifes are gone.
Every single dandelion collected increases the game’s speed slowly and therefore the difficulty.
Furthermore the higher score also brings more obstacles, which requires taking more risks to gather long streaks of dandelions.
A local highscore allows the player to see his progress while a global highscore increases competitiveness all around the world.
Work
The basics of the game were already programmed by another person but the code was made for Unity 3. Many changes were required in order to increase performance and upgrade the game to Unity 5.
Because of how the UI of Unity has changed over the years a lot of scripts were obsolete or duplicate. After some changes I was able to upgrade the whole game to the newer UI system from Unity 4.6.
Once I was done with the optimizations I managed to reduce the script-count by half.
After having optimized the given code my task was to improve the gameplay mainly by adding more randomness to it.
Furthermore I improved the endless mode as the given system was not seamless. There was a lot of loading times which prevented a real ‘endless’ game.
A responsive and scalable UI, as well as gameplay features, were the biggest tasks I had while developing the game.
I also implemented features like Google Play Game Services for the global highscores and translated a few texts to french as the game supports english, german and french.
Copyright Ⓒ 2017 Mixtvision. All rights reserved.
More information can be found directly on Mixtvision’s website:
In the Garden of Dandelions
