Whack 'em Moles
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Whack 'em Moles
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Whack 'em Moles FREE
Whack 'em Moles is an arcade-style game for Roku, where you use your Roku remote to hit moles that appear on-screen before they can run away.
Aim for high scores, complete in-game challenges, and unlock outfits to customize your moles in!
There are two modes in the paid version of the game: Play, and Endless Moles.
"Play", lasts for 45 seconds. Endless Moles goes on until you get 3 strikes. You get strikes by missing a mole, and hitting a direction that doesn't have any moles.
There are some unique features here you don't usually see in these games: different types of moles to hit, powerups, unlockables, and a whole challenge system!
Be careful with the moles that appear. Sometimes it's a single mole, other times it's two moles! Be sure to hit the two-hit moles twice before they run off!
Powerups vary depending on the mode. Both modes feature the following powerups:
Double Points, and Big Hammer! Big Hammer is my favorite one to use, it allows you hit every direction at once every time you press a direction button (up, down, left, or right).
The "Play" mode has an exclusive powerup: +5 seconds! This adds 5 seconds to your 45-second timer.
Endless moles has an exclusive powerup too: -1 Strike! This removes one of your strikes that you've accumulated, which can get you out of sticky situations. This has saved me so many times!
The challenges and unlockables systems go hand-in-hand. Challenges in the game encourage you to play both modes, while also testing your skills and encouraging you to get better.
Challenges can be anything from hitting a certain amount of moles and powerups, to lasting a certain amount of time in Endless Moles, to playing the game in a unique (and maybe a bit goofy) way!
I love seeing different stats when I'm playing games, so I included them in the challenges screen! Pretty much every stat you could want (moles hit, moles missed, powerups hit, powerups missed, etc) is tracked
on the Challenges screen.
When you complete challenges, you'll unlock different customization options for both the moles and hammer!
You can dress up the moles with hats, an accessory, and a new skin (if you can complete every challenge in the game)!
The hammer has a few skins too.
There are two levels in the game, and they're randomly picked when you start the game. Each level has a unique song, and unique mole skins!
The farm level was the first level I made. Here, the moles appear normally. If you let them run off, they'll run into the barn — oh no!
The second level is the desert level. The moles, wanting to be more sneaky, dressed up as cacti to try to camouflage into the desert! Make sure you get them before they run off to the river in the back!
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When I got my first smart TV in 2020, I was surprised to see that there were apps and games on there!
I thought it was a unique platform and that it would be so cool to try to make something myself.
I tried a few times but was never able to figure anything out, other than displaying text on screen.
I gave up at at that point and told myself I'd revist it in the future.
5 years later, I had a lot more free time and wanted to try again to make a Roku app.
I had some ideas after trying a bunch of apps out: something intuitive that didn't require text instructions to play, and used the remote well.
I figured a game where you have to hit 1 of the 4 remote's directional buttons was the way to go, and Whack 'em Moles was born!
I originally thought I could get this done within a month or two. I focused on the main mechanics: moles spawning and despawning, hits, misses, scoring, and then eventually powerups to make the gameplay more fun.
Once I added some powerups, I thought it'd be really cool to try to add a challenge system with goals to work towards.
And once I had the challenges system done, they needed some sort of progression and reward to complement it. Designing the cacti moles, I had more ideas for costumes and thought this was the perfect way to work them into the game.
I didn't know that these two features would end up 2-3x'ing my total development time, but I was having a fun time going for it!
I had no experience creating game assets, art, music, or even sound effects.
Art was the first step. I started with placeholder images (the numbers 1 and 2 for the specific amount of hits the mole needed), and a green background I spent 2 minutes making with my trackpad in Microsoft Paint.
I spend the next few weeks writing the core game logic after (working mole spawns, powerups, scoring), and then I spent 5-15 minutes upgrading the following assets again in Microsoft Paint:
a farm background, a desert background (color-swapped farm level), and some simple one-hit and two-hit moles (that were pretty much just ovals).
Graphics helped the game feel more real, but they still had a long way to go. I stuck with these until the end, when all major bugs were ironed out and the game felt ready to release.
I used an older iPad with Procreate to make all the final graphics, and I started by experimenting with every brush tool until I found things that looked like they fit the farm level design that I had in my head.
After ~15 hours, I had my farm level background!
The desert level was next and was going to get a complete re-do from the palette-swap it previously was. I was struggling with this one for an hour or two since I couldn't get the sand to look right.
After multiple design approaches over another 10-15 hours, the desert level was done!
Last was the moles. I loved the way the moles came out from my first attempt, so I just cleaned them up a bit for the final version of the game.
For the unlockables, they were implemented in kind of a silly way. Rather than creating a mole, a hat, and an accessory, and attaching them on the mole every time they spawn, I created 162 different images of every single combination of unlockables possible.
This was an 10+ hours of manual work that involved lots of copy-pasting, resizing assets, renaming files, and then transferring files.
I went this route because I was worried that having 4 moles on screen at once, each with customizations on them, would be glitchy and inconsistent when transformations (spawning, getting hit, running away) were applied to every mole.
Instead of risking it and having to re-do it later, I did it my way instead. This ended up taking up around 15% of the total space for Whack 'em Moles.
After 40 or so hours, my first attempt at ever making art for anything was done, and the game graphics were pretty much finished!
The music was the next big hurdle. I've played guitar just about my whole life and love music, but have never sat down and actually recorded nor produced anything.
I used a handy-dandy mini MIDI keyboard I bought in hopes of pushing myself to make things, and was able to come up with some tracks and sound effects I'm pretty proud of, over the span of 1-2 weeks.
Especially the main menu song! I love it, and I've listened to it for literally hours through all my development and testing time. I had a lot of fun making the music, but it was stressful at times!
I'd come up with a decent 5-7 second riff, but couldn't figure out how to expand it to last 3-4x as long. I also limited myself to 2 instruments per song in order to keep file sizes small for Roku.
I knew that channels had a file size limit (I didn't think to look it up, I just guessed it was somewhere around 20-30 mb because my game was still being loaded onto the Roku properly). I figured that would be a later problem (and it was).
To finish all the art up, I would just call this "Mole Game" up to this point, because I didn't want to decide what to call it until it was all done.
As cheesy at it might sound for a small arcade-y game like this, I didn't want the name of the game to limit the way I went about it. I wanted to do the name last so it felt like more like a reflection of everything.
Remember me mentioning an unknown max file size earlier? Well, it wasn't anywhere close to the 16 mb that my final game was.
The limit was: 4 mb. The limit was 4x smaller than what I had.
I didn't want to cut any content whatsoever, so I went straight for compressing everything — images (multiple times), songs, sound effects.
I converted some .pngs to .jpgs, simplified my songs and reduced their quality, and got creative with reworking and combining some of the sound effects.
After a few days of trying to reduce the sizes, I was able to get it down to just under 3.6 mb in the end! I did it all with only cutting one asset: a song I created specifically for the Challenges, Unlockables, and Options screens.
I made the main menu song play on these all instead, which is fine since I liked the main menu song a lot more.
Even though this game seems pretty simple, it was actually much more challenging to make than I would've ever imagined.
There aren't a lot of apps that have been made for Roku, especially when you compare it to other platforms (any video game console, smartphones, etc).
As a result, there aren't many resources to turn to when you need help. Documentation, examples from the Roku team and community, and a bunch of trial-and-error are required.
The whole process ended up being so unique and fun! Making a game for Roku was much different from using a game engine like Unity, Unreal, or Godot, as there's no sort of click-and-drag features to use,
or pre-made templates for core interactions and systems.
I used Roku's languages: BrightScript (all the different interactions) and Scenegraph.xml (for layouts and formatting). That made the game creation process very similar to the way you would write traditional software.
Fortunately I didn't have any physics necessary, so that made the process a lot easier as well! To test, you have to load your channel onto an actual Roku device (either a Roku smart TV, or one of the Roku sticks you can buy separately).
Everything was tested at run-time, which added a lot of time to development and testing.
I worked incredibly hard on this game, and it took me multiple months of 40-60 hour weeks to finish. I easily spent 300+ hours making this game, and I enjoyed every second of it.
I can't even imagine how many tens of thousands of moles I've hit through all the rounds I've played. Thank you, moles!
I really hope you check out Whack 'em Moles! The full game is available for $1.99, and it comes without any ads. I'm really proud of all the work I've put in, and I think it's a lot of fun to play!
Try it out with your friends and family!
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