Cues is a 2D mobile game build using Unity 3D game engine. It is loaded with features like multiple game modes, level maker, sharable levels and level generator using an AI (Rule based Expert System)
With 0 marketing spend, due to the game's social features like level sharing.
Our users absolutely loved the game for its game play, UI, music and overall experience.
Users could create their own levels, share it with their friends and challenge them.
Using a Rule Based Expert System developed in-house to give users an endless supply of fun levels
After the success of our previous game Sine Line, it was time for another. This time, unlike Sine Line which was fast paced and aimed to give an edge of the seat experience, we wanted to go for something which would be calming relaxing yet challenging and fun. Also we wanted to target a different age group with this game. The concept of cues had been there in our minds for a while and we decided to go with it.
After the first launch, the response was extremely positive. People has loved the game and had played all the 100 levels in a few days. It would take us hours to design a level which would be solved in minutes by users. This was a problem as the users wanted more and more levels. We could have simple designed super hard levels but that would frustrate our audience. So we decided to build an AI level generator. This was one of the most challenging problems we had taken up ever.
Building an AI that could generate levels while giving us a control over the difficulty of the levels was not too hard. But some of the levels it generated were either unsolvable or too easy. So we built another AI that would mimic the human thought process and play the generated levels and discard levels that took either too many moves or too little moves. This was really challenging as each puzzle could be solved in multiple ways and to try out all permutations and combinations would mean an explosion of cases. We had to come up with some really out of the box ways to make it work.
While designing levels for Cues, we realised that designing levels for this puzzle was really fun, our team members would design levels on paper and pass it around to challenge each other. We though our users would love to do the same and hence built this feature. It was quite challenging as it was not offered in games back then, or even today for that matter. So, as always we has to build our own custom solution using a client server architecture and integrate it into a game built in Unity3D.
A game is like making a movie, but only interactive. It can be launched multiple times, with each iteration exceeding the previous one, until one day, it becomes a diamond of technology, art and design.
“Anirudh Reddy | Co-Founder, Fruitstone.”