Wildmouse Animations was set-up in 2012 by Pete Daniels, a computer game industry veteran of over 21 years. Pete has worked on more than 40 games through his career, including some of the biggest titles of the last two decades such as Lotus Turbo Challenge, Jungle Strike & Nike+ Kinect Trainer (the full list can be seen on the Kickstarter project page).
Pete has been working at the highest level in his field for many years and has recently been working with Microsoft owned Rare as the Technical Animation Specialist on Kinect Sports Rivals (due out April 2014).
Initially created as an outsourcing company for bigger studios, in 2014 it was decided that the company should take a new direction and focus on the mobile and tablet games market which is overflowing with clones and re-skins of the same game types…
This was due to two main factors.
- The number of large companies hiring contractors in the UK north-west was becoming scarce. Over the last 10 years computer games companies in the UK’s north-west have been dying off quicker than the dinosaurs.
- The experience that the Pete has in developing computer games through to completion gives them a good starting point in a market where games can take only a fraction of both the time and investment that the larger console-based games need.
With this in mind and limited resources, the game Bounce was born.
Bounce bounce baby
Bounce was designed with the following design criteria in mind.
- The game had to be simple to create with limited resources (both manpower and finance).
- It had to be original (not just a clone of an already created game).
- There had to be that addictive ‘just one-more-go’ factor in the game-play.
- The time-frame for creation should be no more than 3 months.
The premise of Bounce is simple. You control a bouncing ball from above and all you need to do to progress is avoid falling into oblivion. This is achieved by clicking on coloured platforms which spawn on the screen… sound simple? … Think again.
(latest development build… work-in-progress)
The longer you survive, the more varied the coloured tiles become, with each different coloured tile changing the game-play in some way. For example, landing on a red tile does nothing, but landing on a blue tile will rotate the game, while yellow may spawn many more tiles and green may speed everything up.
The number and type of tiles can be constantly increased and modified to give a much more complex and hectic game as time progresses.
As your score increases to specific levels, the backgrounds will change and strange ‘Easter egg’ objects will float across the background for you to collect. For example, achieving a score of 100 may cause a chair to float across, at 200 there may be a spaceship… at 2000 there may be a teddy bear…
These will always be the same at each score level as well as a score level name… these will allow you to brag to your friends. Have you collected the teddy bear on the Shadow level? No? Didn’t think so.
Completion
The game is due for completion by the end of May, with the Android version being created first for deployment on the Google Play store and all funds raised through the Kickstarter campaign will go towards software licenses / hardware and publicity.
Please help support this project on Kickstarter
If you would like any more information then please contact us by email: [email protected] or follow us on Twitter.
Let’s bring the originality back to our games…
Published: Apr 1, 2014 10:32 pm