Post of pebbles

Hello!

I would like to share a few concept arts I made during the Global Game Jam for popiteru.  At first,  I was obsessed with the water ring toss game formula since it fit well with the "bubble" theme of the jam and so I wanted to come up with an interface resembling those toys, as in our earlier game Deflummoxer it was fun to create a skeumorphic interface that obeyed the rules of a physical device.

Usually I create some quick placeholder images for the game so we can use them for testing. Here's the earliest layout for the game with a different rule-set. It didn't quite work the way we wanted so we spent the first night of the jam brainstorming different game mechanics using standard playing cards.

After a bit of struggling we came up with the stacking bubble mechanic. Next day I made concept arts for the new rule-set and I tried to reduce the color palette. At this point I was still attached to the water ring toy look and tried drawing the surface of the water on the top, later we ditched this concept for the sake of minimalism (argggg).

Meanwhile I made some designs for the tokens. The goal was to create tokens that are clearly distinguishable from each other but still work as a set, both in terms of patterns and the color palette (hopefully we managed to make it accessible for colorblind players as well). Also, we started to think of these tokens as small lost objects someone has collected on a beach and not as flat cards. 

For example the little blue cat is basically a caricature of a Club Mate cap (unfortunately the bird guy coin didn't make the selection). For the rest I made painted pebbles and candies. Also there was a blue marble  among the main tokens but it wasn't included in the final game because it looked off when stacked.

All the animations are black-and-white so it is easier to modify the colors later. I really enjoyed making these animations and I would like to extend the set with new tokens in the future! Hopefully we can include it in an update soon.

This last concept art is already quite similar to the end result, except the bubbles were on the left side. During testing we found out that it is frustrating to drag the far-side tokens through the whole screen, so we put it in the middle which is more comfortable. As we simplified the design the 3D-ish buttons didn't make sense anymore, in the final game we reused the title's shapes as buttons instead.

BTW this was our 10th game we made together so lets celebrate!

If you enjoy solitaires give popiteru a try!