Six Gun Galaxy was a Facebook core-social RPG set in a post-apocalyptic wild-west future (review). It had a complex questing system and story. The battle system was nearly as full-featured as any turn-based RPG. There was also a town-building mechanic. The graphics were made up of spritesheets of 3D rendered animations from several isometric perspectives. The game was discontinued in early 2012 after KlickNation was acquired by EA due to revenue underperformance (that's my understanding, anyway).
I joined the team when they were well into the development of the game, and was immediately put on tools development. After finishing several artist tools for this game, I began assisting the production of the actual game. Six Gun Galaxy was nearly ready for release at that point, so I was given outlying tasks not already claimed by other engineers. I implemented all the integration and the web pages for third-party free offer companies. These companies would allow users to participate in an offer, or watch a video, to receive free currency in our game. Because of that experience, I also worked on the PayPal payment integration work much later. After the free offer integration, it was time to launch, so I assisted with testing. After that, I implemented HTML5 best practices on the page containing our Flash game.
Later, some significant design changes were to be made. I took over for an outgoing UI engineer and implemented the new goal system visuals. The goals system was an always-visible queue of tasks the player could participate in, leading them to the next task they could complete. I rewrote the map screen to be a paginated set of location buttons. I also improved the store code and made a better sorting algorithm.
Responsibilities
- Integrated free offer third-party services
- Pre-release testing
- Improvement to the host webpage (CSS and Javascript optimization)
- Wrote animated goal queue and popup panel
- Rewrote the maps screen
- Rewrote parts of the store
