GUARD DOGS MOBILE GAME
SUMMARY
Guard Dogs was a project I started right out of college as a way for me to fully immerse myself in the game development process. And funny story: it actually also began as a bet. I was debating with some friends of mine who constantly critiqued games harshly and I was of the mindset "if you don't like it, then you do it better." With that statement, I told them that we could make a game if we really wanted to. And when they disagreed and we couldn't, I set out to prove otherwise by myself.
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I spent about three months researching everything I needed to make this a reality, and another six months in development. I was responsible for creating nearly everything for this game, with the exception being the music that was provided by my friend Matt Chambers. Unfortunately, due to this being a project I developed over 10 years ago, many of the original files don't work. However I did manage to recover the original Android APK and if you have an emulator, you can download it and play it yourself for free!
TOOLS
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Adobe Animate
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Adobe Photoshop
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Adobe Illustrator
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Adobe Premiere
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Adobe After Effects
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Adobe Audition
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Clickteam Fusion
CONCEPT DESIGN
In early concept design, I had plenty of ideas on how I wanted the gameplay to function. Having recently lost my family dog Brian, I knew I wanted to make something to honor him and make dogs the protagonists in some way. With that, I went back and forth between making the antagonists aliens, supernatural spirits or a combination of both in the form of cosmic horror.
CHARACTER SPRITESHEETS
After settling on the protagonists and antagonists, I set out to create the animated spritesheets in Adobe Animate. I created all of the assets such as icons, backgrounds and flyers in Photoshop and Illustrator. I then downloaded several game sounds based on the concept, such as dog barks, energy waves and ability activation.
CLICKTEAM FUSION
With very limited knowledge in programming, I sought to find a visual based scripting software that would allow me to code the game. After settling on either GameMaker and Clickteam Fusion, I chose the latter due to its price, ease of platform exporting and the popularity at the time of its most recognizable product Five Nights At Freddy's. After learning Clickteam, I programmed the entire game myself and tested any and all bugs that might occur.
RELEASE
After everything was completed in development, I exported both the Android and iOS versions of the game and created a developer account for both Google Play and the App Store. I uploaded and released Guard Dogs for both platforms and sent the release information to Clickteam to promote on their Facebook.
