Storm Gliderz : Elevated

Track your flying progress and unlock new environments

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Inspiration

Storm Gliders, is an easy-to-pick-up endless adventure runner game with a left-right movement mechanic. The game framework is build to procedurally generate all gameplay visuals every run. Glide in your hot air balloon, dodging obstacles, and collecting coins or gildz, challenging the players to master the art of precision movement. The controls are set to adapt player's comfort with possibilities of stacking and cancelling moves, yet being highly responsive in fast paced gameplay.

What it does

In this "Elevate" version of the game, I have established the short-long term player motivation and rewards for the player's progression. As retained users, players are also rewarded daily, which enables me to cater individual progress based on tracked player insights. The Shop provides an interface to convert items, and purchase more items and bonus environment tokens.

How we built it

Economics - For every run the game consumes a Gas token from the player. You can collect Gas as special token from the flight, or convert Gildz to Gas tokens in shop. A player's progression is tracked with Experience earned by player's performance in a run, which is a function of flight distance covered, coins collected, and powerups or special gems collected. With XP, a player sets new XP Levels and unlocks exotic environment, and bonus levels. The variables are persistently stored at the end of flight and HUD are updated showcasing the last and increment values with cool UI animations.

Special Unlockable - A bonus level is an obstacle free, loot gildz level. It's timing based, where the loot ends at 20 seconds. At higher levels you can upgrade the bonus timer to extend your fun times in exotic bonus levels.

Short-Long term retention - Storm gliderz challenges and motivates the player to keep up with flight fight through Leaderboards. Check yourself in the XP gained, distance covered, and gildz collected leaderboards. In near future, the plan is to develop 30+ quests, challenging the player's ability as well as achievements in the game.

Challenges we ran into

It wasn't possible to do Storm Gliderz quest for this competition due to a Horizon desktop crash bug for quests window with deleted pvars. I have reported the issue to Meta community forum 1335532 as feedback and await a fix to continue making some interesting quests.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Custom_UI - To show progression and Levels, I had to build HUD system (both in game and End Game) to reflect the progress. I made a progress bar and fast counter tick type increments to numbers. Also, this was the first time I was working with Local scripts for UI, which made me realize a lot of dos and don't things in Local vs default server scripts.

pvars system - Used a system where changes to pvar object type can be updated to add, remove variables without any issues to existing user's saved data. This provides us a solid framework for future updates, without stepping in compatibility issues for existing player data.

Art assets Loading - The procedural gameplay environment worked very well to switch environments, other systems (such as timed challenges, hit enemy npcs) which enable different gameplay modes were also achievements to be proud of.

What we learned

With the overall experience, it was quite a learning regarding UI and css as this is the first time coding front end.

What's next for Storm Gliderz : Elevated

In future, the plan to make Storm Gliderz as a shared multiplayer world with racing against each other and tag team racing championships using team api. With this proven base for procedural loading assets, storm gliders plan to grow the team with professional game artist joining the team. More customizable Hot Air Balloon skins, exotic environments (under water, into the mountains, tropical), additional bonus level (interstellar, ghibli land etc)

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