Plasmid Paul (Mobile Game...hopefully)

Hey everyone!
So school ended about a week and a half ago so now I'm summer break. As such I'm hoping that there will be an influx of stuff from me to show. One such project is 'Plasmid Paul', a mobile game that I'm working on.

So here at school, a student organization that I'm in is the Michigan Synthetic Biology Team (MSBT). Every year, it's the goal of the team to do a synthetic biology project of some sort and enter it into a competition in the fall. Along with doing the main project, teams have to do a side project called a human practice project which is basically an attempt at reaching out to the community and teaching them about synthetic biology. Traditionally most teams just talk to high-schoolers and call it good, and as a result they get an average score from the judges at the competition. My team though, is planning to make a game this year, with me in charge.

So the basic premise of the game is this: something like mad cow disease has mutated and started turning people into zombies. As a result, you play as Plasmid Paul and must navigate through 8 worlds consisting of multiple levels to create the cure for said virus. Each of the various worlds corresponds to a step the the cloning process for cells, and throughout the game the player is educated about various things.

So far things have been going well, but then again it's been mainly myself working on the project. I think this coming week or the week after I'm going to be doing a brief presentation to the rest of the team to hopefully get others interested in helping out. As such I started focusing on getting some rough images made to show the team to give them a better idea as to what the game should look like.

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So the above image is a rough version of the first level which takes place in the freezer. The player has to go around collecting the parts seen in the upper left hand corner while avoiding enemies and traps. I've got the basic idea for the look down, I'm just stuck at making the level more ... vibrant? Which is hard to do when a biology freezer is white and filled with white boxes... although I should probably brighten the tape up a bit.

Feel free to give input or ideas. Or if you'd like a more in depth description of the game. Otherwise I'll be updating with various images as I make them.

Hey all,
So my team and I have been chugging away at this, coming up with the level ideas, and now working on the coding in Unity while I'm chipping away at the concept art for the levels. I ended up deciding to change the style of the game, opting for a more basic style. Here are some images of what parts should hopefully look like at some point:

Freezer:
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Bloodstream:
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Infected Bloodstream:
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Woah, how did I miss this? That looks pretty cool!
How long have you been working on this? Are you making these in a vector program?

Let's see here. The project started in early May, with initial ideas and what we wanted from the game. Since then we've managed to figure out what we want for each level, how long the game needs to be, etc. At the core of it all there's just me and another guy working on this, he does the coding while I do the art. That part is a bit bothersome at times because we need to be done by the end of August. So not the most time in the world to be putting a game together. As you can see I've been putting together 'concepts' for each level, I call them 'concepts' because they get the idea across, but they use the assets we'll be using in the game so really I'm doing 2 things at once. After I get these done I'll have to go back and make the actual levels, then export them over to Unity. As for what program I'm using, these are all just planes with solid colors in Blender 3D since I'm going to be exporting them as .fbx files eventually.

New level images:

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Man this is really nice.

The style is cool, the concept looks good.

Looks like a game i'd like to play

Quick update as to where this is at.

Due to time constraints we've had to cut back on the game. What started out with 13 levels and a bunch of cool features has been reduced down to 7.5 levels and some pretty basic game play. At this rate we may also be switching this from a mobile game to be a standard computer game running as a .exe or .dmg file. The reason for the latter switch is our general idea is this could be a classroom aide to help teach kids about the cloning process for cells and as such computers are more accepted in classrooms than phones.

Currently we are aiming to get a beta version of the game out by the end of the month. In addition, school starts at the end of the month and the competition is in early October so we are aiming to have most of September be finishing touches and any bug fixes, we're cutting it pretty close. Personally I'll be pretty happy when this is all over since 4 months to go from initial conceptualization to finished product is just obnoxious to do, especially when everybody is making this in their spare time.

And just to wrap things up, here are some images of various things:
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Browser version of the game now available: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Still a bit glitchy, but due to time constraints we couldn't get it more polished.

That's pretty neat, Scott.  Just think--back when the Sega Genesis and SNES were king, that game would have taken a team of designers and a fairly decent budget!  I like the music too--I bet Sparty would get a kick of out the music you guys came up with.

I couldn't get past level one... just like that really long jump in Super Mario Brothers on the NES, I fell every time.
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