What is upigo

upigo is a casual mobile game where you take control of an ever bouncing ball with one goal. Go as far as possible.

The game currently contains 6 worlds with each their own platform and quirks affecting game play. The worlds use partial procedural generation to make every run unique.

The game will be regularly updated with new worlds along with an increased level cap and new upgrades.

Features

Rank and experience
Upgrades
In game currency
Challenges
Milestones (Achievements)
Online Leaderboards
Second chance mechanics

Future Update

More unique worlds
More upgrades
More levels for existing upgrades
Higher rank cap
More challenge type
Additional languages support

Fun Facts

What is WAYOFF

WAYOFF is the “company” that made upigo. Company is in quotation marks because as of right now it consists or myself, Raphael Baumann.

Origin of the concept

The origin of this idea comes from a small minigame from Littlebigplanet 2. I liked the concept of controlling the direction while the character bounces indefinitely.

The simple two button control scheme made it ideal for mobile.

How long did it take to make upigo

I had naively planned 3 months to make the game, but at the end of the 3 months I felt it was missing something. It took 8 more months and multiple redesigns to get where it is now. Which in total makes the development time a little longer than a year.

This is not counting the future updates.

Made any other game?

Yes, but you can’t play it.

The game was an ongoing project that was mainly event based using video mapping technology.

The concept was that you’d have one big display of any kind and passerby could take part with their smartphones. It was a multiplayer experience with multiple mini-games that were custom made for events. A local festival called “Numerik Games” hosted our biggest live events. You can read more about it here (2016) and here (2017) (contains video).

No Music?

Without talking about the complexity and the time needed to make a good soundtrack, I decided against it because it would increase the app size considerably. Accessibility was one of my main concerns making this game and large file size is are big hurdle for a lot of people with data caps and limited space on the phone.

Same goes for the simple geometric design.