Bruce Wheels our first game fully Spine animated

maocide

Hello, I am the developer of a small italian team called minisaur.
We are 3 people and we converted the game halfway to use spine for characters animation, world animation and user interface. Even our splashscreen is a spine animation and the game runs at 60 fps.

Bruce Wheels
Get it now!! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.minisaur.android.games.brucewheels

This game was mainly designed sitting in a bar, drinking some beer and coming up with silly ideas. This is also true for the characters you encounter in it. We designed so many different monsters: each of them has different abilities and requires a different strategy to be defeated or avoided.

Loading Image

Bruce Wheels is focused around 2 modes: Adventure mode and Survival mode. In the first the player has to complete a huge amount of goals to progress and unlock new objects and levels. In the latter the player has to reach the highest possible score and beat all his friends.

Loading Image

During the adventure mode different tutorials teach you how to interact with all the new stuff. The survival mode for a specific world unlocks only once a player has encountered all possible objects and learned how to deal with them. We currently have 6 worlds with 90 levels and 6 survival modes ready for release.

In both modes, to reach the best score you have to keep a high multiplier by continuosly hitting good stuff, avoiding empty platforms and bad stuff. If you miss one time the multiplier restarts from x1 (the highest possible multi is x10).

Finally, the game is obviously filled with (currently 60) achievements.

The first concept of the game came up 2.5 years ago. Since then we worked really hard to finally release a game we are really proud of 🙂 This is our first game and we hope you like our work.

First Concept Video

You will find more info at www.minisaur.com

So If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions, please feel free to do so here. Thank you!!! 🙂

maocide

Nate

It looks really nice! Very nicely polished and the game idea is neat. Animations and sounds are great! I hope it's a hit!

The only thing I'm not sure on is the name, Bruce Wheels. Is there a story behind the name?

maocide

Nate ：
It looks really nice! Very nicely polished and the game idea is neat. Animations and sounds are great! I hope it's a hit!

The only thing I'm not sure on is the name, Bruce Wheels. Is there a story behind the name?

Hi Nate. Thank you very much, we really appreciate your kind comment.
Spine is an awesome software and we wouldn't have been able to achieve such a good looking game without this great tool.

We chose Bruce Wheels as a name because a good friend of our designer has an adorable hamster called Bruce. And.. well.. we are huge fans of Bruce Willis 🙂

BlackCapApps

I love the great care about polishment for big and small details in your game.
All those animations/interpolations add a lot in fun and graphical quality.

Success in current and future projects!

maocide

BlackCapApps ：
I love the great care about polishment for big and small details in your game.
All those animations/interpolations add a lot in fun and graphical quality.

Success in current and future projects!

Thank you for trying it and for the compliment.
We are glad you like the big we put into this 🙂

Nate

Got a chance to play it, it's really fun! I seriously think you can have the same success as Cut the Rope, it's certainly of the same quality. My wife has played it for hours already. Kudos!

What game toolkit did you use? Any plans to release on iOS?

maocide

Nate ：
Got a chance to play it, it's really fun! I seriously think you can have the same success as Cut the Rope, it's certainly of the same quality. My wife has played it for hours already. Kudos!

What game toolkit did you use? Any plans to release on iOS?

Wow thank you, I'm really glad you like it that much! We can only dream of beeing as successful as cut the rope.
The game is made completely in java and is my first android game, I've learnt from reading Beginning Android Games and upgraded slowly the engine to use open gl es 2.0 and then spine. I used a entity component pattern a bit semplified to plug in easily new game objects.
We'll be thinking about iOS depending on the feedback we have on Android.
Our budget for marketing is really low and we are having a hard time getting reviews. If you have any suggestion on how to proceed to get some attention, that would be really appreciated. Thank you again for giving us the chance to design this game the way we wanted to 🙂

Patriick

Very nice art style here!! Great work... It's simple but powerful. I think the game looks quite fun too 😛 Keep it up!

Regards,
Patrick.

maocide

Patriick ：
Very nice art style here!! Great work... It's simple but powerful. I think the game looks quite fun too 😛 Keep it up!

Regards,
Patrick.

Thank you Patrick it has been a lot of fun making it 🙂

Nate

Writing the whole thing from scratch is impressive and I imagine was a great learning experience, but I highly suggest porting it to libgdx so you can easily run it on iOS. The port should not be too hard and is going to be waaay less effort than any other way of getting it on iOS.

Marketing is hard and seems to be mostly luck and magic. Read on reddit gamedev about how to contact reviewers, they get a lot of mails and it's easy for them to ignore you.

maocide

Nate ：
Writing the whole thing from scratch is impressive and I imagine was a great learning experience, but I highly suggest porting it to libgdx so you can easily run it on iOS. The port should not be too hard and is going to be waaay less effort than any other way of getting it on iOS.

Marketing is hard and seems to be mostly luck and magic. Read on reddit gamedev about how to contact reviewers, they get a lot of mails and it's easy for them to ignore you.

Thank you for the suggestions Nate, I've seen libgdx and seems really good, free and able to deploy everywhere.

We had some luck with a spontaneous review from a russian youtube channel for now and I must say i don't know how they found us 🙂

Nate

libgdx was written by Mario Zechner, myself, and many others. Mario is the author of Beginning Android Games, so is probably a natural progression from your framework based off the book.

Søren

For marketing I suggest the following.

Send a press release to a ton of different gaming sites.
Use twitter to generate interest and also here try sending a message directly to review sites/accounts. If they like what they see they will probably retweet it or do a review. Just make sure you read up on eventual policies they have.
DON'T SPAM! 🙂

maocide

Shiu ：
For marketing I suggest the following.

Send a press release to a ton of different gaming sites.

Use twitter to generate interest and also here try sending a message directly to review sites/accounts. If they like what they see they will probably retweet it or do a review. Just make sure you read up on eventual policies they have.

DON'T SPAM! 🙂

Thank you Shiu, my brother is doing this part, because I don't use social networks much. We prepared a press kit for when we contact review sites to let them have all the material needed.
I really hope we get some answers 🙂

PhilippH

Very cool game idea! I wish you all the best and success!
I like the art style and your animations!

I am interessted in your spine setup for the flowers and the octopus.
Do you mind giving me a little bit more insight in your approach?

Since I am rather new to Spine, I am trying to find the best way and mix between new sprites, sprite swapping, mesh deformations and bone animations.
I am for example not sure how to create a character that switches nicely from different body postures while using the same skeleton all the time (for blending in the game engine) and keeping the sprites manageable (workload for design and production).
I.e. a Cat from top-down view. she sits and idles looking forward, doing nothing, then turn her head around and up, looking up to the camera and showing her face, miauing and looking with big eyes..

Thanks for any advise!

Sheado

Very cool!
Cuteness level is 11/10

sqlhorror

This looks really cool.

Yeah, a year late, but I'm new to the forum! 😃

maocide

Hi Philipp,
I asked my brother, he is the one the worked on the animation, here is his answer:

Hey Philipp!
Thanks for your wishes 😃 we are so glad you like our game!

Honestly I think that a correct balance between sprite swapping, mesh deformations and bone animations can be found accordingly to the style you want to get in the end.
My habit using Spine is to focus on animating bones mostly. Then I start tweaking the curves to get some nice accelerations and to exaggerate almost every movement a little bit, so they look more natural and catchy. Then, usually, if some more perspective is needed, I add some mesh deformation to give it a final retouch. I always keep the sprite swapping as a “last chance”. It’s of course needed when, for instance, you have a drastic change of perspective, like the case of the cat you are about to animate.
What I suppose you are concerned about is how to properly blend a texture swapping (that may look like a stutter) into a smooth animation, right? In those cases what I usually do is to make that swap happen in the middle of a really fast movement, so that the discontinuity becomes less noticeable.
To animate the main character of our game, for instance, I had to swap textures for the feet (during the jumping animation) and for the mouth (to match the various voices). What I did was just to locate the swap in the middle of some fast movements. To animate the mouth, for example, I used to aid the swap with some scale. Let’s say I have to pass from a wide open smiling mouth to an almost closed “o-shaped” one. What I would do is to scale down the smile so that it almost matches the size of the second one, than make the swap. Eventually, the “o-shaped“ mouth could be a little bit up-scaled when the swap occurs, so that the transition looks even more smooth. All this process would be happening in something about 5 to 10 frames, so it’s really fast and the texture swap becomes almost invisible.
Animating the octopus I actually did the same. When I started animating it, I was not so comfortable using meshes, so I preferred using the process I just described to you. Right now I would strongly suggest to take advantage of meshes to animate something like those tentacles. What I did was to put the swap in the middle of some fast movement to make it less noticeable. In this case I’ve also put a motion blurred tentacle texture in the middle. It’s just barely noticeable when you play the animation, and of course it’s another piece of texture that has to be added to the final sprite sheet, but it helps keeping the result pretty smooth.
To animate the flowers I just to split the stem in multiple parts, making them scale up one after the other so that it looks like it’s growing up. I am pretty sure that using meshes would be helpful in this case as well, but even some scale can just do the job if does not create weird effects. In this case the texture was pretty simple, so there was no risk to get unexpected artifacts.
About the change of perspective of the cat you just mentioned, I think our carnivorous plant animation could be interesting for you. In this case I had to make this plant look in front, and then tilt the head back while opening the mouth. What I did was just to scale down eyes and forehead, slightly translate them up and fade away while the mouth is scaling up. As always I try to keep this “difficult” transition as fast as possible, so eventual imperfections are not noticeable.

Hope my experience can be helpful J thanks again for appreciating our job!

I hope we could help you 🙂

Nate

Good advice there! I'm also a big fan of over exaggeration for most animations, especially small ones. While you are tweaking your animation frame by frame, in a fast paced game players are unlikely to have the time to appreciated the details in your animation so sometimes movements need to be exaggerated.