Research project v/s Production project

Working in a research lab for almost two years, I developed 8 projects using Unity in 2D, 3D and VR. I became fluent in development of these projects and it was all going great, I thought of developing an android game to deploy in the play store. This is where my journey to a different realm started.

I was able to develop the base mechanics of the game in less than a week and I thought maybe a week more to launch the game. Well, not so easy.

A game needs to have a theme and get graphics assets accordingly, and there begins a look for ready-made assets for the game, I could find some suitable for the theme but they would not suffice, I needed to make some myself and make changes in others to have a good fit.

The game started with a turtle theme and pivoted to a dragon with the name "dragon's journey".

Dragon's Journey

So now after 2 more weeks, I have the game mechanics and a set of suitable assets ready for deployment. Demonstrating great promise in my system, not so good on a mid-level mobile device. 35-45 frames per second ain't gonna cut it. I was using all the great techniques and technologies for graphics, tessellation shaders were one of them, what these meant for the user are much better graphics for the more computation, in mobile devices, it also meant much more battery drain and heat, and let's not forget lower frame rate too.

Turns out lower frame rates are not bad for user experience when they are consistent as eyes get accustomed to them and it'll appear all smooth, new techniques to read about.

Tessellation shaders are out, high poly models are out, and highly mobile optimised assets are in with unlit shaders, lightmaps, normal maps and bump maps. The code was already optimised for mobile deployment in the first place.

After one more week, the game is optimised for mobile devices and still looks good with Consistent 60 FPS on low-end devices too.

Time to work on the UI of the game, now UI is the least bothered part when you're working in a lab where anything you make is to be used by the researchers who are constantly in touch with you, what they need is something which does the job. So, apparently, I needed to learn quite a lot about the UI design part as the levels are not the only thing players are going to spend there time on.

UI changes in game's main menu

After 2 weeks and lots of feedback from my friends, I got some far with UI design and game mechanics thinking "it's time to launch it".

Launched a beta version, Until this time all the testing has been done with me being with the person trying it out, now they were alone and didn't know what to do and how to do it. Instructions added. leaderboards added, achievements added, and mind opens for more.

So, the two months trying to launch the 'game' made in 1 week were full of learning for me, the never required optimisations, basic UI which just works, being with the user of the product are a few things from the list to think about when planning to deploy on a large scale rather than a research project,  a proof of concept project, or a product intended for a small group of people.

Here is the link to the game being developed, currently in the 25th build of beta.
Update: The game is released now to the android play store here.