Quest Up

Quest Up - 10 Jan 2024

Warning:

The background dithering is made for native devices so reading this on bigger screens can generate a weird effect.

What's Quest Up?

Quest Up is a game for iPhone and iPad where the player’s objective is to allow the character to reach the exit of the level.

Like Mario Maker, the player places pieces on the scenery so that the character can interact. Unlike most games, the player has no explicit control, movement is automatic, and all the pieces are placed beforehand.

Items

To allow flexibility, we have four items:

Mushroom: makes the player jump
bow and arrow: destroys cactus and thorns
platform: allows you to close holes or change the player’s direction
umbrella: prevents the player from being crushed by rocks.

This way, levels can be made relatively dynamic using a combination of these elements. To place an item in the scene, the player drags it from the item bar to the desired location.

Levels

The game has 18 levels, divided into 2 worlds: overworld and castle. The change is only cosmetic and affects obstacles and scenery.

Team satisfaction:

This was a disaster. The game scope was way too big. Communication between the members was lacking, to say the least. We all felt disappointed in ourselves, but the most affected was our designer. She did a great job we, the programmers, did not.

Looking back:

Possible improvements:

Grid system: Harder to implement, but the grid would allow the player better feedback and be less sensitive to changes.
Architecture: We tried to use the Centralized Control architecture. It’s a good design, but we didn’t apply it correctly.
The tools: SpriteKit makes the challenge of making this game ten times harder. We were limited to it for non-disclosable reasons.
The team itself: while we made it work, we didn’t have a good affinity for workflows and mindsets when creating something.

the Future

I’m the publisher of the project on the app store, and I plan to fix it, probably by migrating the codebase.

I tried in the past to rewrite from scratch. But the curve was so steep on top of that, new features that would make the game be, in my opinion, actually playable would take too much time to develop, so this is on freeze. But I will definitely come back to it.