Snake meets Bomberman. Run around on islands in the sky; blast away enemies and obstacles; free boomies and collect powerups in this action packed, 3D mobile game, with a high visual polish.
Video
All original video content was taken off of YouTube after the studio closed. The Twitter account promoting the game is still around and contains some videos though.
About BoomieBlast
Brief: BoomieBlast is an action platformer for iOS set in the fantastic and colorful Skylands, in which you help the Boomies against the Evil Mole Empire.
Note: The developing and self publishing TreasureHunt Studios GmbH was declared bankrupt in February 2020. Since then, the company and game websites have gone offline and so has the official trailer on YouTube.
Outline: ~20 people, ~1 1/2 years, iOS using Unity3D, released globally for iOS on 25. April 2016
Developer: TreasureHunt – Twitter: @TreasureHunt_HQ
Publisher: TreasureHunt
Position: Unity3D Developer – Gameplay Programmer
Time frame (of development): 2015 – 2016
Official Page: formerly BoomieBlast.com, now defunct due to bankruptcy, the Twitter account still exists though.
App Store: Apple App Store
My responsibilities:
- Gameplay Programming
- Engineered the core gameplay structure
- Programmed most of the enemy AI
- Integrated and extended tile-based editor from the Asset Store until we created our own as a team
- Optimization
- Created a mobile optimized, tile based terrain shader
that enabled blending between tiles of different textures in 1 draw call - Optimized allocations so that no Garbage Collection happened during gameplay
- Created a mobile optimized, tile based terrain shader
- Editor Extensions
- Terrain texture and blending texture atlas helper generating all 27 blending
- Side responsibilities
- Set up Jenkins for Continuous Integration pipeline
- Set up a local Mercurial (HG) version control server
- Defined Coding Guidelines and version control branch structure
- Reviewed applications for programmer roles on all levels
Team efforts
Boomie Blast was TreasureHunt’s first game and while we worked on it the team and the company where still taking form. As is the nature of the startup, people needed to fill multiple roles and tasks switched hands all the time, to the point that pinpointing who did what gets rather murky. It also becomes less important, because in the end, we all had one goal. Making the game as great as we could, as a team.
While having ownership of a certain area or feature can be great and feel very rewarding, being able to let go is equally important and build great trust within the team. It did not really affect the code quality either, since we peer reviewed each others commits, making sure that we spotted potential issues as soon as possible. Funnily enough, that is also trust building and was welcome by everybody, since no one can know everything about the surrounding code base and the more eyes where on it, the more confident we were in it’s stability.
I had the pleasure of being on the team from the very beginning and witnessing all the shifts and changes, learning a lot in the process, from the process and especially from my team mates (and I hope I was able to do the same for them). We coordinated and learned across disciplines as well as we ironed out our production pipeline. Everyone learned from everyone and I’m really proud of what we achieved while embracing the chaos of an early stage Start-Up.