Greymatter - Video game

🚀 game devinteractive

We built a 2d side-scrolling space game for Greymatter as part of a marketing campaign to demonstrate the power of Azure and the Greymatter platform.

From idea to prototype

The team at Greymatter had an idea of building some sort of fun space themed game that could be themed around Microsoft Azure services. We thought about a side scrolling shooter with the player controlling a spaceship and shooting at enemies, but we ultimately decide on a more casual game where the player would have to dodge obstacles and collect pickups.

We wanted to make this accessible to the widest audience, so decided on a browser-based game so no need to download anything, and wanted it to work equally well on mobile as well as desktop.

We selected Phaser.js as our game engine. The first step was to see if we could use Tiled editor to place the graphics and load matching collision boundaries into Phaser.

Above: Early collision testing prototype

This worked well, and we were able to quickly build a prototype level using the lovely graphical assets provided by Greymatter and get the player’s ship moving around.

Iterating and polishing

Now we could concentrate on building the level layouts, whilst also adding gameplay features like pickups and moving debris.

We added a scoring mechanism based on damage sustained to your ship and the number of pickups collected, and your final score is displayed along with a marketing link which meant Greymatter could track people’s scores and see how many people were playing the game.

Throughout the iterations we continued to gave the game more “game-feel” with particle effects, sound effects, music, title screens and end of level screens. We also added a “boost” mechanic which would allow the player to speed up and get through the level quicker, but at the risk of taking more damage if they hit an obstacle.

"We’ve launched to the whole company [...] Everyone has enjoyed playing it so far and lots of comments on how cool the soundtrack is! 😊"

"This is great thank you 😊. Gameplay looks awesome!""

"This is great Kris! Had a play and it’s so much fun 😃"

This was a super fun project, and it was great to see the game getting continually better as we iterated on it based on client feedback, and it was certainly a unique way to market a product!