Rainbow Blues Cat

Overview

Rainbow Blues Cat was a mobile game built entirely on my own released on Android and iOS in 2015. Players drag their finger horizontally across the screen to navigate the character and survive a barrage of falling bombs for as long as possible.

Development

The concept stemmed from a prior college project titled "Rainbow Space Ninja", simply named after the free assets used in it. That game was a 3D Linux game made in the OGRE engine in which random physics objects flew at the player that they had to sidestep or jump over to dodge. The concept was fun but the gameplay was broken as there wasn't always a way to actually get past the spray of objects that landed in the player's path. Two years later I decided to to make a simplified and more polished 2.5D mobile game variation that balanced this gameplay mechanic as a personal Unity project.

All the physics objects became spherical bombs that bounced around the environment in predictable ways. Special bombs periodically drop in, but there's always a path for the player to navigate through, narrow as it might be. Since this was the entirety of the game mechanics, the game was intentionally very difficult to increase replayability.

The core "rainbow" asset was the same from the previous college project, in which I took a free, colorful UI texture, compressed it horizontally, and made it infinitely scroll to create a sort of hyperspace, rainbow-like effect. I created the rest of the art myself as well as the music track. I handled all programming and put in additional features like leaderboards, social media sharing, as well as ad monetization through Chartboost and Google banner ads.

Outcome

Despite collaborating on many previous gaming projects, Rainbow Blues Cat would be the first game I shipped as a complete product on official digital storefronts. Working on a solo project allowed me full control to rein in the scope and focus on a simple but polished experience that could realistically make it to release.