STARFRUIT, GUTSU'S CART, and redone UI

While with this team, we were put to updating Fruit Ninja after the original team moved off of it.

As mobile games were moving to the freemium model, we were brought on to add in-app purchases to the game for the game's two year anniversary.

Working with another team we created three powerups - The Bomb Deflect, Berry Blast and Peachy Time, as well as Starfruit - the game's currency, which would allow you to use earn powerups for free.

I worked on the Gutsu's Cart, our store for purchasing the powerups, the balance on how often the powerups would appear and how the Starfruit would appear in the game. These are now even more different since the game's 2.0 update. To see the original, you can watch it here.

 On top of this I worked on improving the game's user interface in Halfbrick's own UI system. Previously the menus were all hard-coded, the change over allowed the screens to be dynamic across both Android and iOS screen resolutions, particularly in the wake of the iPhone 5, and helped along the interaction between both of those versions.

Windows 8

Every game platform has its quirks -- Xbox Live Arcade has specific menu requirements, Android devices have the numerous resolutions and processors to deal with, but Windows 8 has some unique additions that differentiate it from the competition. These additions also require a good designer mind to work with, which is what I’ll be talking about in this article.

From a designer’s perspective Windows 8 was pretty cool to work with. These new additions had me think differently about how a game like Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride could work within Windows 8, and allowed us to explore some new styles for both of the games. Let’s explore those designs!

The Snap View

For Windows 8 any application that uses the new Windows UI has a rule -- they must support widescreen (16:9), full-screen (4:3) and snap view (1:4). On a tablet device users can use an app in both Fullscreen and snap view at the same time, allowing for a new type of multi-tasking on a tablet.

This sort of thing is great for a lot of apps -- It’ll work flawlessly for Twitter, Facebook and Messenger apps which already use smaller windows on a desktop, but for games? That requires some rethinking.

Fruit Ninja has always been a full screen game, it’s never had to work in such a small space before and normal gameplay just wouldn’t work out. For applications the snap view is for when you’ve put the application “on hold”, so to speak. It’s not your current focus. So what can Fruit Ninja be if it’s not in focus?

In the consumer preview version of Fruit Ninja we had the most boring example you could think of -- a bouncing Fruit Ninja logo. Whoop-de-do, that’s not fun at all! But it was simple, we had nothing else at the time and we needed something fast to be in that version.

But we wanted to do better. With the current Windows 8 release date looming we could only budget out roughly a week to work on the snap view mode, so I began to start doing some mockups in Photoshop using Windows 8 screens. Other examples had been boring, or just what you’d expect -- what could we do for Fruit Ninja?

What if the screen went through your Fruit Ninja statistics? We hadn’t really had much in terms of that in the game compared to out other title Jetpack Joyride, but it could be interesting. Maybe go through Sensei’s Fruit Facts? That’s a nicer “pause screen”, almost like an ever changing quote-a-day calendar. What else?

What do people play Fruit Ninja for? Sometimes it’s just to pass the time by -- simple actions, to relief stress of their daily work life. What if we could harness that? What we ended coming up with is “Stress Relief” mode. Put Fruit Ninja for Windows 8 into snap view and you get this cool little extra. The game creates a carousel of Fruit for the player to play with, and they can just slice fruit at their leisure. No score, no achievements, just slice. “Grr, all this paperwork is making me mad! Gotta slice some fruit to calm myself down!” that sort of thing.

From initial mockup to implementation the whole concept worked as I had hoped. We had previously used a carousel for another special mode so we were able to use that -- just slightly modifying it to include the games’ name on the backing. And it works great! It’s fun to just watch Fruit go up the screen and just slice a few every couple of minutes.