Dare 2010: Ramblin' Wreckage on its Android platfomer HellaUmbrella

As part of the Dare to be Digital student game development competition being held at University of Abertay Dundee, we hooked up with those teams working on games for portable devices.

First up is team Ramblin' Wreckage and their Android-based platfomer HellaUmbrella.

Ramblin' Wreckage: It's difficult to say just what inspired us to create HellaUmbrella.

If we had to pick a game that most resembles its current form, it would have to be LittleBigPlanet, but except for Nic, none of us has played it. And Nic wasn't around until after we had pitched our game to the Dare to be Digital team.

We wanted to build something for mobile phones because they allow for a shorter development time, which would let us build something highly polished.

We were originally planning for the iPhone, but because of suggestions from others we decided to switch to Android, which has proved to have been a good decision.

Because platforms such as Android are fairly new in a rapidly increasing mobile market, we had numerous design discussions on how we could make the game controls intuitive for the average user.

On the one hand, anyone outside of Dare playing our game is likely to be the owner of an Android phone and therefore understands the back button and the like. However, our impending audience was Protoplay [Dare's public unveiling], which is an eclectic group of people comprised of various ages and experiences. We had to do as much balancing as we could to make the game as intuitive as possible for both groups.

As far as the platform's affect on the gameplay, we like to think that they go hand-in-hand perfectly. We had to do some play testing to figure out the things that felt the best, but in a game where you can rotate the world, the Android and its accelerometer were the perfect fit.

The limitations of the physical memory of the Android phone has been the biggest hurdle. For the artists, it has meant getting creative with tiling for both foreground and background elements. For the programmers, it has meant optimising every inch of the code to produce smooth gameplay at a decent frame rate.

A few of the mentors at Dare have compared our experiences with those of game creation on platforms such as the Super Nintendo. Every platform has its little quirks though, so if it wasn't a memory problem, it would be something else. That's just how these things work.

If we had to decide on just one aspect to highlight, it would have to be the power behind the creation tools.

We plan to release a level and script editor for players to use to create their own levels to share with others. These tools are extremely powerful in terms of the time frame we had to build them. Using our script editor, you can build pretty much anything you want, such as switches or levers. Even simplistic artificial intelligence isn't out of reach.

We plan to release HellaUmbrella on the Android Market for free. We have a multitude of ideas for the future, but we don't have a solid plan as of yet. For now we encourage people to check out our forums at www.hellaumbrella.net where they can share what they've built.

We've decided to continue to update the game after the competition ends, and try to form a community around it. We have had several discussions on where we would like to go from there, but it is difficult to make plans for years into the future.

Nic and Andres both want to start an indie company after college, and may end up joining forces. As for everyone else on the team it is hard to say, they are certainly welcomed to join.

You can find out more about HellaUmbrella via its website, or check out the video below.

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