Tony Porteous
Technical Designer
The Trail
The Trail - Frontier Challenge
Innovative Mobile Title
2017
Are you ready to discover the undiscovered? Are you ready to climb the tallest mountains, wear the finest clothes, and earn a fortune beyond compare? Then welcome to the New World! Welcome to The Trail: Frontier Challenge!
The Trail is a mobile game developed and published by 22cans and Kongregate. Located in England, 22cans was founded in 2012 by industry legend, and creator of the God Game genre, Peter Molyneux. 22cans also made a game called Godus.
Role
UX Developer
I worked in Unity to develop the user experience and implement the graphical design.
- Coding: I worked extensively in C# using the Unity Engine
- User Experience Design: I solved challenging touch-screen control problems.
- Teamwork: I acted as a bridge between art and design.
Physics Inventory
Gesture Driven 'Real Physics' Inventory
The Trail is a game about exploration and collection with a twist: You have to physically pack your items. As you travel, items jostle and fall out. Careful stacking allows you to carry more things.
Crafting a physics based inventory presented a number of technical challenges
- Robust Design - The inventory needed to be chaotic, but in a way that didn't punish the players unfairly. Items could not be lost beyond retrieval under any circumstances. I needed to create extensive safeguards to prevent this.
- Gesture Controls - The player needed to have fine-tune control with a touch based interface. I designed a gesture based system to interpret player input in a responsive fashion.
- 2D to 3D Mapping - The inventory was a 2D interface layered into a 3D world. I needed to correctly translate between them as items moved out of the 3D world and into the inventory space.
- Playful Design - Physics systems are messy in a delightful way. I crafted the control system and animations to compliment this, making everything about the controls playful.