Element Wars realtime competitive multiplayer color matching.

Download on AppStore

(Currently softlaunched, only available on the Portuguese, Canadian and Swiss app stores)

When: 

From January 2014 to October 2014

I worked on this project under the employment of Miniclip

Role:

Gameplay Programmer, Network Programmer

Technology:

cocos2d Erlang_logo

Summary

Element Wars is a free-to-play match-4 competitive multiplayer game, currently released for the iOS platforms.

In it you can challenge other players worldwide to 1 on 1 battles, where you try to outlast your opponent. Each combo of 4 elements cleans your board and sends Oil orbs to the opponent, getting him that much closer to defeat.

By the use of this core mechanic and an assortment of equipable Active and Passive powers, you must outplay your opponent and force his board to fill up to the top, granting you the win.

My Contribution

Initially, I was put on the team for this project with the purpose of taking the role of client gameplay programmer, but when the need and opportunity arose, I was happy to take upon the responsibility of also being in charge of server development.

During development I worked on:

  • Gameplay, both on client and server side, working on the challenges of a realtime multiplayer game.

 

  • Animation, I developed the games animation system and the workflow for importing and triggering animations in-game asynchronously from gameplay state calculation.

 

  • AI Opponents, in order to never have a player waiting too long to find a match, I fully developed a server-side only AI system, capable of launching AI Bot threads as necessary to match up against players in queue. These bots adapted to the players skill level, and to the tier they were playing on, while pretending to have human-like behaviour (making mistakes, and sub-optimal plays).

 

  • I was also worked on the Configuration System, which is able to dynamically propagate new gameplay parameters, as well as new art assets to all connected clients without the need for a new binary submission or even server downtime.

 

  • Being passionate about Game Design, I also engaged in design discussions on multiple occasions, as well as writing several game design proposal documents with ideas I had for the project. Several of which were approved and implemented on the final product.

 

All in all, It was a fantastic learning experience for me, and my first commercial project.