Cow Tippa! Board Plans

Do you know how awesome white boards are for planning games? And how paper prototypes bridge the gap between designers, programmers, and artists? Well, let me show you some cool stuff on the game, Cow Tippa!

At this point, [Pending] - the team - only had "agriculture" as the theme we were to use.  One of the first ideas was to 'farm' enemy units like a player does in classic MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) fashion.

From MOBAs, we came across the thought that Creeps (farmed units in MOBAs) would be another player's crops, where if you could destroy enough agriculture, you'd come out on top in selling your crops.

In this picture, you can see that we started playing with the mechanic of tipping cows...

Running with the bovine line, [Pending] figured that a bunch of cows would be better than just one.  With a never-ending line of cattle, the game would never end, but more points would drive the player to new high scores!

One thing hit right off the bat was whether to do a top-down or side-view of the moving animals.  Because of my concern over a quick schedule, the argument of how long many different layers in a side-view would take to code and test was made, and a top-down view was secured.

Paper mother-lovin' prototyping.  This is the first one I constructed to get a feel of how a gauge like those in golf-sims would impact an experience.  Moving the cow pieces while handling the gauge allows another player to tap on the table to represent clicking.  What we felt at the end of the experiment was that the mechanic was just OK.

Coming into Saturday, I just couldn't support the gauge idea.  Having gained the element "volcano" (our game needed something to do with a volcano), I proposed a simple context of tipping cows into a volcano.  Easy!  However, making 2D objects (we decided to use 2D Toolkit with Unity) go in a believable circle was not so easy...

During the process of making a 2D circle path in Unity, I had drawn a possible UI setup of the game, with our angry volcano god in the corner with the volcano in the center.  I gave him a hat and a stern demeanor.  This was done completely by accident, but became a feature in the final game.

After about 2-3 hours of trying to get circular pathing to work (and with a personal apprehension that it would be too intensive for our time constraints), you can see the single bridge design on the far left of the board.

Here we see a few notes on benchmarks we wanted to meet with a diagram of what objects needed to do in code.

Those big, blue rectangles in the middle represent what could be done with the game on a mobile screen.  Some ideas were used about putting a farmer tipping the cows on a platform in the middle of the bridge, but it was soon scrapped for being out of context.

Saturday's work in progress.  It is apparent that cows can hang in space; didn't everyone know that?

To show how the player was doing, one of our programmers suggested getting the volcano god angry.  To fill what he had in mind, I put up a few changes of face for our deity.

Screen time!  If you are already ahead in mechanics and design, menus can become important (though, they do little for a game).  There are a few layouts present in what could be done, with in-game screens, instructions, starting frames, and credits all present.

To do a background for each screen, I needed a set dimension in which to work in as the UI visual designer.  Heads-up: Cow Tippa! is 960 by 600 pixels.

Say hello to Feature Creep, the hat-wearing, suit-owning, tentacle-legged... thing.

And Shuckle.

Did I mention that donkeys made it into the game?  Whenever a donkey is knocked into the volcano, the god, for a split second, looks like this meme.

Just more of the same.  We were changing things on the fly, both visually and in code.

I really am all about the prototyping.  Not sure when this was completed, this design was during the early hours of Saturday, where the power gauge was still on the table for consideration.

One more!  Here is the best rendition of what the final in-game screen looks like.  Before creating any UI items, I ran it by the entire [Pending] team to see what they thought of our game's layout.  Though the "Cow Points" are now called "Score" and a bit smaller onscreen, and that the title is missing, this is what a player sees in the game.

And, in the wise (summarized) words of Jonathan, our project manager, paper prototypes are good as, if for nothing else, examples to show designers, programmers, artists, and waiting-in-line players what the game actually does.

Or doesn't do, in the case where the cows were drifting off the bridge, which could be shown to the programmers without having to recreate the issue!

I hope this was helpful in getting some insight as to what went on in team [Pending] making the action-packed game, Cow Tippa!  The team is working on improving the game a little more, so this article will be updated with new builds in the future.