@Haley Vien came up with the idea for a "boba shooter" in our very first brainstorming session! We tossed together a few elements that we thought would be fun game ideas on their own, like "shooting stars" and "bubble wrap popper", and the end result was a very ~ sweet ~ combination.

The ultimate goal of our game was to collect stars trapped in a bubble wrap sheet by popping them with boba aimed from a straw. The stars would be used in a shop to purchase various upgrades, like different cup designs and powerups.

Some of the words we thought of to describe our game were:

• Silly/fun
• Addictive
• Cute

Ideas from the first brainstorming session - Jacqueline's notebook

In our second brainstorming session, we broke boba shooter down into a skateboard - a minimum viable product - and an airplane - our vision of the full game. Everyone agreed on the following divisions:

🛹 Skateboard

• Shooting
• Moving straw
• Bubble wrap with stars
• Boba counter

🛩 Airplane

• Powerups and ugprades
• Reforming bubbles and stars
• Level differentiation

At the same time we were also considering what development environment to use! Through our own quick research and some advice from Paul, we narrowed our options to either LibGDX or Unity. Both had their pros and cons, but Unity ultimately won us over because it was GUI-based, would be helpful to us in the long-run as gamedevs and it looked like it had so much potential once we got over the learning curve! 🎮

FlappyBird built in LibGDX to test the waters. Just so it doesn't go to waste :,)

Following the Rollerball tutorial in Unity 3D.

By the way, our own mini-tutorial for Unity can be found on this page! 🔗

Unity Tutorials

In our third brainstorming session, we split ourselves up into researching Unity and making paper-pencil sketches of our game's aesthetics (from the beginning, we always agreed that visuals was a huge part of our game)!

This is the design we think is concrete! At least for now...

More designs - usable assets even - followed from Ivy:

First draft of the boba cup. Notice that the different parts of the cup have been drawn on separate layers to make animation easier - Ivy

We didn't just draw designs in this session, we also came up with ideas for specific game mechanics and animations! For example,

• The boba can be "charged" by long-pressing the screen to control how far it is shot. The animation for this would be the boba moving up and down in the straw
• When the user presses the start button, the screen transitions to the game mode with a straw stabbing the cup