Gameplay involves taking control of the Shiba Family—Mango, Mochi and Kuro—each with their own unique ability. Players must clear obstacle courses, switching to the correct Shiba to jump, slide, dash and bash through the levels.
We decided to expand our experience with casual gaming and attempt to craft a full-featured and cross-platform casual game for iOS, Android and Desktop platforms including Windows and Mac. After much tinkering with Cocos2D-x, Corona and other frameworks, we landed on the Moai Framework. We were excited that they were a local company offering their support with the framework. And so our journey began.
At the time we started developing game concepts, runner-style games were very popular. This was well before the “Doge” meme made Shibas a household name, and we already had some great source material courtesy of our office pal Mochi (the Shiba Inu), so we decided to make a runner about Shiba Inus saving their chums.
We began with a super simple starling-based prototype that allowed us to explore key gameplay concepts early on. Meanwhile, sketches and diagrams were developed to experiment with how we thought the game could look visually.
Giving our Shibas a direction was key. We designed a level-based story that spanned five different geological areas. As the player, you take the role of the three shibas, each with a special ability. You are trained and tasked by your Shiba Sensei to rescue the denizens of Shiba Island who are threatened by an ancient volcano that is once again active.
One of our primary goals was the creation of a game that could be deployed to almost any platform. We started with a Lua and C++-based library that allowed us to create custom hosts for our game logic that could be deployed “anywhere.” This includes iOS (iPad and iPhones), Android, Mac OSX, and Google Chrome. SFML was utilized as a wrapper for the Mac deployment, swapping keyboard for touch interaction in this case.
We launched with the Android and iOS versions of the game, following later with a high-resolution desktop version for Mac OSX. We created integrated campaigns and communities on Facebook and Twitter and created targeted advertising campaigns for many marketing platforms, including partnering with smaller online businesses in creating marketing takeovers on their sites to promote the game.
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