Melon Smasher Dev Log

Melon Smasher: Don’t Murder Square Cat is a game designed to simulate factory production line system. In the game player can press button to control a machine on a pipeline to smash water melons. The goal of the player is to smash as many melons as they can and try not to smash on square cats on the production line.

Mechanics of the game is inspired by the factory production pipeline system. The amount of products on a pipeline is the stock. Products flow in and be processed by machines and then flow out. The concept of this game is inspired by the origin of consumption and consumerism: industrialization and mass production. For an industry system, the amount of progressing goods inside the factory is the stock of this system. Raw materials flow in and become progressing goods on pipelines, and be processed and come out as consumer goods. Also injuries and deaths caused by the failures during production are part of this system and count as inevitable in early factories.

To restore this system, I make a production line in the game that watermelons come out from the left and flow to the right. The player controls a machine to smash melons and produce melon juice. The melon juice is stored in a container and flow into a pipe. There is also a square cat near the container drinking melon juice and checking its quality. The amount of melons on the streamline and amount of juice in the container are two stocks of this system. There are also square cat flow into the pipeline and player should not smash them(as mentioned in the title). If the player smashes a square cat, it also came into containers. If the square cat find an eye ball inside the container, player will lose. There is also a combo system in the game that the combo increases when the player consecutively smash on melons and come back to zero when a melon skips. The score is added based on the number of combos and the pace of the game goes faster when the combo is higher. There is also a mechanics detect if player hit 2 or more melons by one smash and give player extra scores.

I spend most of the time to develop the game feel because that is the core experience of this game. After a melon been smashed, it is replaced into small pieces with rigid body and a particle system. It also instantiate invisible balls and when those balls collide with other colliders like a wall, it instantiate a blood sprite as the child of this collider. Different colors of cats also have particles and bloods with different colors. I also added screen shakes when player hits a melon. The pitch of the BGM is also changing as the game speeds up.

For next steps, I would like to add more visual and audio effects to this game. There should be an effect showed up when you reach a certain combo, and I want add more effects for double and triple smash. Also I took(steal) the bgm from Donkey Kong Country. If I have enough capacities(or money), I’d like to make an original music(or pay someone to do it for me) for this game.