My role in the project

While at Polyfruit, I was designated to create everything except art. I led a team that changed projects, sizes and people every month, ranging between working solo or with a team of up to 10 artists. This instability and lack of diverse resources in a company with over 60 employees was an extra challenge to work with, however, despite these hardships, I still created games to the specifications given within the deadline, rapidly learning the new team members’ abilities to ensure quality and provide a level of stability.

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Project Overview

Project Doom Train is the main game I worked on while with Polyfruit. The concept was simple, defend your train and complete unique objectives as you sped through the underworld by sticking turrets to the top of your carriages.

While a simple concept, the use of different turrets having different specialities, combined with set enemy spawning per level made every level feel like a small puzzle of finding the best combo to clear your objective and escape.

The other piece of the puzzle was adding more carriages to add more turrets. While each carriage provided 3 more turret slots, they were also further away from the main engine. This leads to a gameplay dynamic of the first weapons you buy also being at the front, being the most active and important. Players had to decide if selling off a cheap starter turret for a stronger variant was worth the cost of buying a new turret in a lesser position.

Turrets came in three kinds: kinetic, laser and missiles.
• Kinetics were good at dealing with Flesh and were hit-scan, making them excellent at killing enemies far away from your train
• Lasers were excellent VS armour, however, suffered in their range and turning speed
• Missiles had no speciality and travel time, however, their homing rockets were great for dealing with a herd of enemies at once

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Retrospective

Doomtrain was the biggest and most complete project made in Polyfruit. It was a simple but flawed concept, as while the turret mechanic was interesting, it lacked the moment-to-moment gameplay that hyper-casual gameplay thrives off. Buying a turret felt fun and the train going faster and faster was exciting and flashy, but felt repetitive quickly. The reward of dominating the level took too long to realise, even if it was incredibly satisfying, and the reduced effectiveness mechanic of the carriages made this reach an undesired and too-achievable peak.

Working for Polyfruit was a rapid learning experience of dealing with lots of different roles and situations while remaining within expected production plans. The downside to this rapid evolution process, enhanced by the nature of the hypercasual game market was the constant changing of the guard. Who I was working with could change each month, if not every week as projects started and died.

Very few projects were created past prototypes made for internal videos, hence the nature of the products showcased being multi-functional for runners and turret/auto-shooter-based gameplay, and given the simplistic nature of Hyper-casual games these games had very simple mechanics.

Development Videos (UE4 Blueprints)