Wild Kingdom

The Idea: One time while eating lunch with my Dad, we were discussing game ideas and what I could create next. He mentioned about an arrangement game where a bar with rings on them are arranged by colors. Immediately I knew what he was talking about, I saw a similar game played with physical bar and rings in India from a video on the internet. I did some searching on the internet and found out a similar game named "Tower of Hanoi", but that uses vertical posts instead of horizontal bars.

The Design: Initially I thought of using colored rings for the arrangement, but as the levels go higher, the bars increase and so does the rings and ring colors, that means there would be more color that would be hard to see for people that are color blind. That poses a huge problem, because my Dad is color blind.

He suggested arranging vegetables instead, and then a few hours after lunch I created a prototype of that arrangement puzzle that uses vegetables as the icons.

The Icons: The fastest and cheapest icons to use are the Vegetable Emojis that are already installed by default on any smartphones and PC today. Because they are part of the Unicode standard, the browser renders them as text, meaning the game loads instantly without needing a single external image asset.

The most logical way to put them together is to design the "bars" as a plowed lane of soil, and the surroundings is green to suggest they are grass. After a few hours of testing the prototype I've reached a high enough level and realized: if you are only arranging vegetables, it gets boring real quick over time. And so I decided to add more vegetables, but the new ones were barely noticeable from the gameplay loop. I then decided to include non-vegetable icons.

Since the vegetable icons grew boring at higher levels, I decided to add animal icons and other Unicode icons over the course of testing the game. On top of randomly changing icons every level, I thought it would be cool to also have different biome theme for the background and lane design, and so that is what I did, I added more biome designs which is also randomly chosen every level by the algorithm.

The Name: The original name that my Dad suggested was "Vegetable Sort", but because this is not about vegetables being sorted anymore, I then decided to think of other names for the game. After about 10 minutes or so of brainstorming with myself again.. I thought why not use "Animal Kingdom" because there are animals, and the plants feels like it's part of it because they get eaten by other animals. But the name is too commonly known and they may just overlook my game if I use that. I really like the word "Kingdom" tho, so I kept thinking of other names.

"Grand Kingdom" is another name I thought of because I used to watch One Piece and there was this place called "Grand Line" which I really think sounds cool, but I realized that's like a teenage boy trying to piece together 2 cool words to sound even cooler. I did not use that name.

After a few more minutes of ruminating and racking my brain for a name, I was about to quit and thought to myself: "This is impossible.... what would be a good name for a kingdom of plants and wild animals, like a wild kingdom?.....": WILD KINGDOM!

Wild Kingdom: Now I have the mechanics, the icons, the name, and the game, I was ready to set the game up for the app store. A few more tests here and there, and then a few more improvements with the badge icons, and then a few more polish with addition of menu icons and sounds then I was about ready to deploy it into production.

The Sound: The last thing I added to the game was the sound effects. I used javascript to create the audio using Web Audio API, because I did not want to use an external audio file for the sounds based on a bad experience from the past. I had a website in the past which hosted 1 single 30 minute audio file and played it almost daily while testing my site, and it hogged all the bandwidth of the entire month within just a week of using my site, and I was the only one using that site. Now imagine if hundreds or thousands of people playing the game and technically playing that hosted audio file everytime they move an icon. I would be broke before I become rich, and I am already broke now.

I wanted to use a simple movement sound that is not too distracting while the user still keeps focused on the game. After a few minutes of thinking, I came to a realization once again: Chess sounds.

Chess has been played by millions of people throughout history, it is played intensely in championships all over the world. Grandmasters play the game while maintaining super human levels of focus, and yet they are not distracted by the sound of the chess pieces hitting the board. And so I have decided that the sound I would imitate with the javascript code would be a high quality chess piece hitting a high quality chess board.

Deployment: Now that I have the design, the game, the sound, and proper tiny refinement of details, I was ready to finally push this version into production (Developer term for "let people use it now").

I pushed the web version into production and it was live on the website, tested it for a few minutes, was happy about it, and then I decided to port it to android as a standalone mobile app, and for the following hours that is what I did, and then I applied the game for Google Play Store.

Ending notes: This is one of the first few logic games I have created and I plan on creating more in the future. The game is not perfect but I will be refining it further, and also I accept feedback and criticisms, which you can send to our contact info.

If you reach this part of my story, thank you for reading and I hope you were entertained and enjoyed the game that I created. I will create more.