History of the development of a mathematical puzzle add more

The story was written by Pavel Ivasyuk and this is his game, but he himself is not registered on Stopgame, so he asked me to post from his account, since it is from him that the main news about the activities of our team is posted.

add more (or the first name of this game plus plus) is a math game with an emphasis on quick and creative thinking in adding numbers to get the number given.
From an idea in a phone notepad in 2014 to release in 2017.

The idea to create a game came to me back in 2014. Then I was still in my 4th year at university. The fact is that I lived outside the city and the road home took about an hour and a half, and all this time I needed to occupy myself with something. It was not always possible to compensate for the lost night’s sleep and reading books was not easy. I had, and in fact still have a dream, to become a good programmer, and not a crooked coder. The thoughts that the end of university was soon, and I could do practically nothing, made themselves felt. It’s time to release your first program! Well, what about releasing ideas as such… And so, once again on the way home, a fleeting thought came to me and a gameplay was outlined, which I quickly recorded on my phone. “The player has time to add the numbers and get the number according to the task”.

The implementation did not http://slots-n-play.co.uk/ take long to arrive. At the university, from the second year we were taught the C# programming language. I studied it diligently and knew almost everything (as it seemed to me then), but when I sat down at Visual Studio, I realized that I didn’t know how to implement it (displaying numbers from the bottom of the screen), so I decided to set a static N number of digits, by clicking on which we sum and get the number as assigned. It looked something like this:

At this point, the development of the game stopped for six months, as more important matters appeared. This was an introduction to the Unity3D engine and writing the first game directly on the engine as part of a university program. At the same time, I want to note that the subject was called “Game Design Theory” and according to the assignment for the coursework you need to divide into groups and create a game, the choice of tools and the type of game does not matter. Everything is optional. 2 were created.5D platformer and this was the first step into the gaming industry.
In September 2015, an account was purchased on Google Play specifically to release the game. Work has already begun directly in the Unity3D engine. But the fourth version of Unity did not support Canvas UI (support started in version 5) and therefore it was decided to work with the NGUI plugin. It looked like this:

The game still did not receive the proper impetus, since in the absence of an artist from outside (and even hands from myself) – everything stopped at this stage.
The game received a continuation in 2016. Everything has been redone for the new UI from Unity. The only improvement was the implementation of dynamic changes in numbers. That is, the numbers came out from below and were hidden from above. During this period of “visibility” it was necessary to select the necessary numbers. Unfortunately no screenshots. No copies left.

2017 was the last year for the development of this project. In February of this year, after winning GGJ, I met Sanya and Max, we created the GameDev team “Burp! Games" and in between working on our joint project "Deep Ones" I spent time developing "Add more". The game changed the screen position from vertical to horizontal, acquired a new appearance from free UI assets. But the game still lacked game balance, since after each task everything increased in a huge progression, and there was not enough time to complete the action. There was also no store in the game, not even in the plans. After testing the game for some time, it was decided to return the vertical screen layout. It was more convenient that way. The case stopped in March 2017.

After the release of “Deep Ones” on September 2, 2017, I had too much free time, and our new project was only at the stage of sketching graphics and plot, I decided to finish “Add more” at any cost. I asked an artist from our team to work a little on the graphics. He may be a pixel artist, but he still did it better than me. I drew some details myself during development, because it’s faster this way. And after 3 years, it’s time to learn at least Paint. The game has taken on a completely new look. I always wrote down ideas for games in a notebook. This is how the store appeared. There wasn’t much to do on the Odessa-Kharkov train, so I came up with items for the store (time slowing down, time stopping, completing the current task and universal color) and upon arriving home I implemented it all. In app purchases from the unity engine itself were also added and initialized in the Google Play Developer Console. I didn’t think long about advertising, I chose the same advertising built into unity. Historically, I have not had a good relationship with adMob from Google and often had to deal with a conflict between two plugins from Google – the advertising plugin and the Google Play Services plugin. I tried to add a leaderboard and now it is in passive development. Again problems with the plugin. The application connects to the service, but the leaderboard does not display. In the latest updates, I improved the balance of increasing difficulty, and also added 3 levels of this same difficulty. We plan to add achievements and still fix the leaderboard.

Now the game looks like the screenshot below.

Thank you everyone for reading! Have a nice day.
Link to add more on GooglePlay: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adk.addmore