📱 Playables Project #1

A copy of an existing playable from a third-party company made in Coco’s Creator 3.x.

This was a very experimental project where I was tasked to work out the feasibility of making playables in-house using Coco’s Creator as a game engine. Having just worked with Javascript for some work on Bitcoin Miner I was fairly with the language so typescript wasn’t too much of an adjustment.

As this was also an exploratory task, I had to do a lot of research and documentation. Once I’d completed the playable I wrote full documentation of what I had learned, any limitations the engine had, and the process of making a playable from the builds for each platform with additional notes where needed. It did present some interesting challenges with no circular references and an entirely new API to learn and sometimes translate as a lot of the documentation is in Chinese. But it was a good little break from my main work on Bitcoin Miner at the time.

The playable itself has a small gameplay loop that is meant to illustrate the kind of gameplay found in the main game in a digestible form. The whole playable runs for around 30 seconds depending on the ending you reach. Pressing any call to action button will end the ad opening the store page for the game the playable is for. Most of the time this goes through mraid which most playables platforms use as an endpoint with the mraid.open() method call. The first ending is just pressing the download button that is constantly on screen during the playables runtime. The remaining two are reached through gameplay with both showing an end screen depending on if the user upgraded and rows or not.

Behind the scenes, it is still a little janky as I was still learning the engine’s quirks while working on this project. But in future projects, I’m sure I’ll get even better with it.