Do you remember our review of the awesomely customizable game Toy Attack by Animoca Brands? Because today we’ve got an article you won’t want to miss! …if you haven’t checked out our review of Toy Attack you can check it out here…
Before we start we’d like to thank the Animoca Brands Team for participating in our interview and for answering all of our geeky questions! Thanks guys!
…and without further ado, our interview begins…
Ok first up, why did you decide to make Toy Attack?
Toy Attack is a leaner and meaner follow-up to our award-winning game Turbine Fighter, which is a robot fighting game with mid-to-hardcore RPG elements and story.
Although Turbine Fighter is an amazing robot combat game, we wondered how we could make it more accessible to players who are primarily interested in PvP combat, and how we could level the playing field so that obsessive grinders don’t have an overwhelming advantage against other players.
The answer was to take the core engine of the game, strip everything else, and develop and expand certain elements to produce a game focused purely on asynchronous PvP robot combat.
We chose to emphasize brains over brawn. We added a block-based coding system to program the robot in order to allow players to optimize their robot’s combat effectiveness, effectively removing the need to grind for hours on end.
The result is Toy Attack, a game for players who love building robots and watching them tear apart opponents. It is a “metagame” that highly emphasizes strategic thinking. It is both easily accessible to all players but also has depth.
How did you design and develop the incredibly sophisticated and fully customisable gameplay system?
We used Gunpla building as inspiration. It is great to build a model, but it is even better when you mix-and-match different parts and colors from different models, and make a creation that is truly your own.
The robot customization system was adapted from Turbine Fighter, then we rewrote a lot of the code to accommodate several adjustments. The goal was to minimize hassle for players and allow us to make balancing tweaks more easily. This means we can release new components and weaponry more easily than before.
But the part we are most proud of is making our players write simple code without even realizing it. We added the coding feature because building a robot is not enough – you also have to program it to be more effective than someone else’s robot. In this the year 2017, more people should be familiar with coding – after all coding runs almost everything in the modern world. So we built a programming interface for your robot in Toy Attack. The beauty is that anyone can use it, regardless of tech knowledge!
Can you tell us a little about how the visuals (i.e weapons, parts, etc) were made in Toy Attack?
The visuals use Japanese anime as a starting point, developed into a distinctive and original art style by our team’s talented artists.
What advice would you give a new player trying Toy Attack for the first time?
Check out what components and settings your enemies use, then come up with a counter tactic by tuning and coding your robot. Research, trial-and-error, improve – that is the winning formula.
Is there an ultimate ‘developer build’ which is practically invincible?”
…and if so, can you give any hints as to how to build it…
Although we do have a few builds that are incredibly strong, players are still able to annihilate them if they invest some time to research and test, tune and program their robots. There is no unbeatable and unfair robot in this game.
Ok, now for some geeky questions. What programming language and or software did you use when making Toy Attack?
We are using C++ and a very heavily customized Cocos-2dx engine, and the Integrated Development Environment is Xcode. Speaking of that, we hope there is a dark theme for the whole Xcode!
What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing Toy Attack?
The loading time was a challenge! We trimmed players’ save file size and optimized the loading process which sped up the loading time by about 10 times.
Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?
We are a group of anime lovers! The idea of Toy Attack came from looking at the real sport of robot combat and imagining what it would be like if it had awesome Japanese anime aesthetics.
A few words to Toy Attack fans on Edamame Reviews.
Toy Attack will get additional coding functions and robot components in the near future. We are also implementing some new features into the game, so stay tuned!
Here at Animoca Brands we recently soft-launched another innovative product in a few countries: Ankaa. Ankaa is a rhythm game featuring futuristic remixes of famous classical music, like Bach and Beethoven. If you are a music-lover you will probably enjoy this game. And the art is just awesome! The global release is coming up soon, if you cannot get Ankaa in your country here is a game trailer:
Lastly a few words on how you feel about Edamame Reviews and our service.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Edamame Reviews for a fantastic review of Toy Attack. We are honored that our efforts in this game (particularly the coding aspect) were recognized in your review!
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