MilkAway (Mobile game work in progress)

Roles: Graphic Design, Illustration, UX Design, Gameplay Design, & Animation.

MilkAway is a mobile side scrolling space adventure game in which the player pilots a spaceship to travel the stars and reclaim Earth's stolen cows before Earth runs out of milk!

Inspiration

As my team and I explored new game ideas, we came across a fun little game known as Jetpack Joyride.

We had a lot of fun dodging and jetpacking through stages and collecting coins. We decided to use this as our jumping-off point.

Watch out for those electric traps!

Making it our own

We quickly decided that a fun idea would be to make a game based in space. It could be the world's best endless runner. We tried to keep the idea of tapping to make the ship fly upwards, while not tapping would make the ship descend. This, however, ended up not working too well for us. The task of keeping your ship afloat felt tedious for some reason.

Our fingers got real tired keeping our ship safe, haha!

We wanted to make the game look modern, so we went with a flat design for the whole game. The player would fly through space, collect crystals, refuel, and dodge asteroids and comets.

Here's some footage of one of our earliest builds.

The goal of this game was to fly through the universe to find a new home for the human among the stars. We implemented a fuel meter, a distance meter to show the player how far they have traveled, and several power-ups to encourage them to get a high score while playing.

Several ships were designed to be unlocked using the player's in-game points.

I still love that paper airplane ship design.

Things were going well for a while. But as we continued our development we found our selves not enjoying the mechanics and the general theme of the game. We felt that our audience would be very narrow if we stuck with a serious theme and wanted something more playful.

Doing a complete 360

With this game, we decided that we wanted three principles to deliver a great experience: simple controls, visual delight, and replayability.

With these principles in mind, we got to work and came up with a more fun and playful idea. MilkAway!

Playing with the idea of Aliens abducting cows for their own nefarious schemes, we created a story where Earth is running out of milk and in order to fix this problem, the player would need to fly out into space and rescue the cows from their Alien kidnappers.

With Milkaway we wanted to change up the controls to perhaps make this game feel better. We implemented 4 zones where the player can fly in. One zone on the very top and bottom, and two zones in the middle. The player would then swipe up or down to move between these zones. We felt that this change made the game control more precisely and it easier to get through obstacles.

We then decided that a great way to make players want to keep playing our game over and over again would be to give them a feeling of discovery while flying through space. So we introduced a system where depending on the distance and random occurrences the player would reach several planets and other celestial bodies.

A robust achievement system was also added to the game to add some more challenges for the player. These achievements can vary from choosing a certain ship to upgrading your engine to a certain level and using other utilities that can help the player blaze through difficult areas of the game.

Future of MilkAway

This game is still a work in progress. Stay tuned for more.

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