Naga Rush
Context and inspiration
During my first year of engineering school, I teamed up with 33 people for the Student Council campaign. To contribute to the demarcation of our team, I decided to use my own talents and passion to create a game! Inspired by Jetpack Joyride, this genre would appeal to any student and the rankings would get people competing each other and talking about us. I then added to the mix a few references to our school and soon enough, everyone in the campus had our logo on their very phone! We released the game on both the App Store and Play Store, and it is still available on the latter here.
Two months and a dream
I was going to have to do the game in two months so it would have time to make an impact on the campaign. As it would be the first big project where I felt the pressure of responsibility and with a deadline, I applied the project management knowledge school taught me to make the most of my time. I planned all the features and content that I wanted in the game, then prioritizing and adding them step by step in an iterative process, constantly getting feedback from my teammates. Eventually, as time went by, I could narrow down what I would be able to produce before the deadline, I used To-Do lists to help me, and eventually I stripped down some of the game content but implemented all the features I wanted. That’s still the project which I’m the most proud of!
Two earlier iterations of the project
I got hacked!
It was the first time I implemented some web backend for a project, and even though I took some precautions, such as using prepared SQL statements, some clever and malicious students couldn’t resist attacking my game and found some vulnerabilities I would never think about. Hopefully, they were fair with me and instead of breaking the game, they mostly did this for fun and they gave me tips to improve the game’s security.
An update and a new game
The game had such a great impact that I could negotiate some budget from my team treasury to port the game to iOS. In the same time, I updated the game to add some content, improve the security and reset the leaderboards so that the game would get another burst of hype for the last week of the campaign.
The next month, a teammate told me that a friend of hers wanted to ask me to remake the game for the campaign of their own school, and was ready to pay for it. It felt great to hear that my game was appealing enough so that some people would think it could help them! I took the opportunity and had a good time exchanging with him to do the most of what he wanted as per the time he gave me.
The trailer for the update of Naga Rush, featuring the new car transformation, magic drink, and new cosmetics
The other version of the game tailored for another school, Aristo Run