Crustacean Frustration
Crustacean Frustration is an endless brick breaker mobile game designed with a good message at heart: Don’t trash the oceans! Brick breakers are known for being pretty boring and bland - a boring grey ball bouncing around hitting color blocks until everything is gone. Since then we’ve got some interesting developments with those same brick breakers going endless, but most are still fairly bland! So, my team’s goal was to take that (surprising fun) core and spice it up with a fun theme. After some deliberation, we settled on a crab fighting against a tide of spring breakers.
Crustacean Frustration was developed over the course of ~2 months during my 2021 Summer internship at the MassDigi XP program. I got to work in a awesome multidisciplinary team of 7 equally ambitious interns over the course of the program: 3 programmers (myself included), 3 artists, and 1 audio engineer. On top of my role as one the programmers, my boss also assigned me to be the team’s producer, which meant that I had a lot of responsibility as far as ensuring the team success went. After a ~2 weeks of ideation and dirty builds, ~1 month of raw development, and ~2 weeks of post launch maintenance, 1,000+ downloads and 22,000+ view on our YouTube trailer above, which I would consider a great success!
Go check out the game yourself at the download links above - you might find yourself mindlessly playing away very soon!
Roles & Responsibilities:
Producer:
- Setting up and running agile-like stand-ups daily
- Leading ideation discussions
- Guiding healthy team decision making
- Keeping the project scope in check
- Communicating with the marketing coordinator
- Communicating with our boss for important turn-ins
Programmer:
- Save system
- Event system setup
- Block spawning system
- Ball firing system
- Various powerups - squid, shark, whale, pufferfish, & broken bottle
- Bubble aiming guide line
- Ball and trail customization backend
- Performance optimization through object pooling
- Purchasable powerups
- Game balancing and tuning mechanisms
- Fixing merge conflicts in Plastic, our version control software