First concept pic for Kosmo Spin

Before starting the production of Kosmo Spin we had some ideas for a puzzle game in which you would spin your finger in circles to match up blocks. A match 3 puzzle game didn’t feel like the most hot thing ever, so we transformed the concept into a action/arcade game, which eventually became Kosmo Spin.

So the only idea we had was that you would use the touchscreen to rotate a planet or ball, to collect or deflect incoming stuff. That was basically it. We had some brainstorming sessions, and initially Nod was going to collect incoming space hats:

Hats are funny. But why oh why was there not a concept for Nod wearing a fez?

Hats became balls and we realized that to warn the players where incoming stuff would spawn, we needed some sort of character launching the stuff. Enter UFO:

Can you spot the ball that didn’t make it?

For a long time, the only objective was to head balls out to space. We came up with the breakfast pickups because the game really needed something fun to occupy the players with when not deflecting balls. There were stuff that did not work in the original design, and it was a very frustrating game, because the only thing you could do was to avoid the UFO beam and bounce balls. So almost everyone that tested the game, including ourselves, would just follow the UFO around. And then the UFO would beam you up. So it was sort of like we punished the players for a behaviour that we had created as designers. It just wasn’t very fun. So we had to come up with something to do when not bouncing. So that’s how the breakfast things came along.

Quests were added pretty late in production, to give the game some more personality and something that we could easily update with new stuff and ideas.

The first Quests!

Early version, with a softer background

Color tests, screen grabbed directly from the first version on iPhone. The first one looks really dull now! A big issue was that screens on different devices differ a lot, so lot’s of different tests were done to make it look good on all screens.

Being our first iOS game, a lot of lessons were learned. Keeping a lot of stuff on the same map for best performance is the way to go!

Random stuff that didn’t make it. Beware of evil watermelon-handgranade-creature!