Our second game, the Tiny Acrobats

MarceloBarce · Mar 7, 2014

Hello guys,

Some months ago I posted my first game, named Retro Runners, it was my first work as a programmer and it received good user reviews and many downloads (300.000+).
That was really unexpected and motivated us to start a new game.

I made it with my friend Arthur, he made the art and marketing stuff and I made the coding, sound and animations, but this time we worked very quietly, without posting info about the game out there.

Unfortunately, this time I don't have many pics of the last days of development proccess, but you still can see how the project evolved.

This new game is named Tiny Acrobats, and is inspired by a old game for Magnavox Odissey, named "P.T. Barnum's Acrobats", if you don't know it, check it out:

At first, I was not exactly happy by making the game, we planned to make a 3D game, and that was not looking good, not working good, that was going bad for me (programming) and for Arthur (art):

That was hard (for me) to code, and Arthur was not used to 3D art like that. We tried to make some changes and start adding the HUD, but it wasn't evolving nicely:

Then, after hearing the Behold(another brazilian studio) guys made their game Knights Of Pen Paper using NGUI, we decided to restart the project making it 2D using NGUI (at that time, there was no Unity 2D).
I know it may sound weird to make this gameplay using NGUI, since NGUI was meant to be used only for interfaces, but... well, let's forget it, haha.

Arthur wasn't used to make that kind of art in 2D too, so it would be like Retro Runners... a BIG development training for me and for him.
This is what the game was looking like in 2D, at first:

We couldn't make a good HUD, the characters were ugly and the environment was so... square.
We were certain that was better than the 3D experiments, but that was still... bad.

Some weeks later, Arthur received some kind of divine inspiration and decided to restart for the third time, as did I with the codes (I felt like an asshole, I was REALLY noob with coding and that gameplay was awful).
I asked some opinions about coding and a friend of mine gave me really nice ideas.

THIS TIME, we knew it would be the last try, we spent no more than 2 days to make the game look as it looks right now (1 week before launch), and we didn't take screenshots in the meantime, so I will show you some of the screenshots we're using in the marketing.

As the days passed, we decided to make new scenarios, the Pirate Ship level, the Japan level, the Forest level and the Moon level, all of them featuring unique characters.
Recently, we added a new red background to the Circus level (which I don't have here right now) and dynamic weather to most of the scenarios.

Pirate Ship:

Unity forum won't let me post more pics in this post, so I will have to post only the url

-Japan level

-Forest level

-Moon level

As you can see, there's a Combo bar in the right side of the screen, and when it is full, the player can use a special skill (like the Magnet shown in the Japan level screenshot).
The red Circus level probably looks a bit better than the blue one, but I don't have a screenshot right now.

We finished this project last week, and finished the porting (for Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry) today. We're just waiting for the app stores review proccess to end.

Here's the teaser trailer:

It will be available on all the app stores soon and I will update this topic as soon as it happens.

You can check some updates in our Facebook page also.

*sorry for any english errors, this is not my native language (we are brazilians)