by John

One of the earliest challenges came in deciding which foods the animals would eat. It was clear that they couldn’t have their real diets since this would complicate the game unneccessarily, not to mention leave us with an unmanagably large number of food types! At the same time, whilst it was obvious I would have to take some liberties with reality, it would be nice to get each animal eating at least one food that it would really eat.

After much cross-referencing with wikipedia and various other webpages, I managed to come up with a list of 20 foods that would give each animal at least one food they would really eat. A further food type was added for convenience, which all animals would be content with and thus allow the player to quickly get all their animals full up again before getting back into all the individual micro-managing.

Later on down the line, this would aid in solving a problem that had been looming for a while – namely, the introduction of strategy.

The problem from the beginning has been in our attempt to make UrZoo a game with something for everyone. A noble goal to be sure, but how to cater for the more casual player as well as a keen strategist was a puzzle to say the least. A breakthrough came when I split the foods up into different food groups. By then splitting the animals up in a similar way according to the different food groups, I was able to solve the initial problem and introduce a further level of depth all at the same time. Of course, it isn’t as simple as each animal being linked to a corresponding food group, but you’ll have to play to find that out for yourselves =).

By creating the groupings I had, I was now able to accomodate players that would want to play for varying amounts of time (e.g. a longer time in one sitting, or a short burst every now and then) thus making it easy to play casually, whilst also containing a layer of strategy which a keen player could exploit to their advantage. Success!

Of course, there was much more to consider besides what the animals would eat, but you’re just going to have to wait and see what else is in store when the game is released =).

By Cody Dyer: Lead Artist

Being the newest member of the Fluffy logic team:) (a little over 3 weeks), streamlining UrZoo’s paperfied art style has been an interesting journey. With a casual audience in mind all the animals need to be none threatening, reasonably cute, easy to identify and stand out against the myriad of games featuring zoo and animals. Based on original artworks and technical limitations we assessed what worked and didn’t work, from there we created a little design bible to guide the artists and ensure a consistent style.

Using the bison as an example I roughed out the basic form of the body and exaggerated its definitive features such as it’s large head, small horns, massive shoulders, humped back and tiny legs.

Having established the basic form I refined the line quality imported the image into Photoshop and applied the final patterning to the animal.

The image bellow shows some drawings created during the bison’s development.

By Will Bolam: Lead Programmer

In my previous diary I explained how we integrated Facebook into UrZoo to create an in game screen showing the player all of their friends. The next step was to let the player visit their friend’s zoos.

Traditionally, and indeed on every other games I have worked on over the last 10 years, a player’s save data is stored locally on the device on which they are playing the game. This is great for speed and security, but no good at all for sharing that save data with other players! In order to share player’s zoos we needed to store the save data online, ‘in the cloud’. Every time a player saves their zoo it is saved to the cloud, and then when another player wants to visit that zoo they can download the zoo from the cloud and interact with it in game.

We looked at a number of online data storage services, as well as considering building our own, and eventually decided to use Amazon Web Service’s Simple DB (http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/). We chose Simple DB as it was cheap (at least until usage becomes very large) and highly scalable to meet demand in the future. Another factor in favour of Simple DB was that there was an iOS library that we could use (http://simpledb.ios-aws.com/home/download) to reduce the amount of code we needed to write to get everything up and running.

With this sytem integrated, players could visit the zoos of their Facebook friends playing UrZoo. The final part to implement was to allow players to interact with their friend’s zoos, and for their friend’s to see these interactions happen. We created a set of behaviours that players could perform, including petting and giving treats to friend’s animals, watering friend’s crops and helping out in friend’s refreshment stalls. We also allow friend’s to award kudos (our harder-to-obtain in-game currency) to zoo’s they have visited, so players can choose to reward their friend’s zoos if they have enjoyed visiting! When a player returns back to their own zoo, we save the visitor interactions to the cloud using Simple DB ready to be downloaded by the friend next time they load their zoo.

Having created all this we still have more ideas to implement, we really believe that one of the most fun elements of our game is going to be showing your zoo off to your mates so we are looking into ways for players to message each other within zoos, and also for players to sell each other exotic animals they may have created!