Brainstorming #
Valorant is a first person shooter game developed by Riot Games. The gameplay of Valorant consists around two teams of five competing against one another by attacking and defending an objective. They do this by shooting guns and using abilities to eliminate the enemy team or plant the “spike” and complete the objective. Valorant follows a classic free-to-play model where the game itself costs nothing to play but players are given the option to purcahse cosmetic weapon skins.
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App Development #
Valorant Gun Simulator was developed in Unity Engine 2019.4.12f1. The gun models used in Valorant Gun Simulator are taken from the official Valorant PC game. These models are cleaned up in photoshop and turned into compressed game ready PNGs. The muzzle flash sprites used in Valorant Gun Simulator come from the Unity package Sprite muzzle flashes. All of the sounds in the game are recorded and sampled from Valorant then cleaned up into MP3 files.
The main menu consists of Unity Button GameObjects that enable or disable parts of the menu. These menu elements of seperated into GameObjects like categories, so if the user navigates from rifles page 1 to rifles page 2, rifles1 will be disabled and rifles2 will be enabled. Inside rifles1 and rifles2 are jpegs that represent the menu interface, and buttons overlayed over the menu interface jpeg. These buttons are the navigation buttons and the scene selection.
Each gun has its own scene. This is, admittedly, a very inefficient way of doing things. If I were to remake the app, I would only include a single gun scene that has a single renderer for the gun and a renderer for the muzzle flash. The sprite and GameObject position that gets pushed to the renderer would depend on a argument pushed when the player enters the scene.
Anyways, in the gun scene I made, there are three gameplay buttons. The red button fires the gun. It uses the script vcnxzivow;aj The yellow button “reloads” the gun. It plays the reload sound that is set to that particular gun and prevents the player from firing the gun until the reload is complete. Lastly, the blue button plays a “kill sound”. In Valorant, there is an audio que everytime the player gets a kill. This sound plays in an ascending scale. This changes based on what gun skin was used for the kill. So in Valorant Gun Simulator, each gun scene includes 5 “kill sounds” that play in an ascending order every time you click the blue skull button.
Publishing #
Valorant Gun Simulator Version 1.0 was released on December 10, 2020.
The first version of the game had a short and sweet description. There wasn’t too much thought on search engine optimization. I wanted to get a product out on time and didn’t have enough resources to perfect the marketing for the game. The icon was thrown together quickly in Photoshop and consists of the Reaver Vandal gun, a gun I didn’t include in the game at the time, and a promotional graphic as the background. The images for the app listing showed screenshots of the game with no added graphics.
Future Updates #
Version 1.5 was released on Apr 28, 2021.
Previously, in version 1.0, any device with an aspect ratio different from 16:9 would display the app improperly. This was due to the app using a JPEG image to display the menus in the game. For example, the main menu was a JPEG with invisible button objects over the navigatable pages. If you clicked on the rifles menu, the page would enable the riflesMenu object, which was made up of the buttons for each rifle and the riflesMenuImage under it. It would also disable the mainMenu object. The problem with creating a menu this way is that the menus would not be dynamic. The menus would be locked at the menu image size which was at a 16:9 ratio. The image and buttons lined up, but they did not use the same anchor points. A device with a different screen resolution, such as a tablet, would have trouble navigating the menu.This bug was fixed using a script attatched to the camera that would measure the maximum size of a 16:9 resolution on the device screen. This would become the new outputted resolution, and anything outside of the output would appear as black bars.
There were a few more major updates that came after this.
Version 1.85 released on May 10, 2021
Release notes :Added plenty of compatibility changes. Over 95% of modern smart phones should be able to run at a higher performance level. Also added new Magepunk weaponry.
Looking back this description was a little… much. Over 95% of modern smart phones… why did I write that? It would be more professional and simple to write Performance Upgrades. Magepunk was a weapon skin set that came out around this time. I added these gun skins to the game.
Version 2.0 released on Jun 23, 2021
Release notes :15 new guns from Valorant added. These are the
K/TAC Sheriff K/TAC Vandal K/TAC Bulldog K/TAC Operator Prime Phantom Prime Frenzy
Prime Odin
Minima Spectre Forsaken Operator Forsaken Classic
Origin Vandal Infantry Guardian Infantry Ares Ion BuckyMinor performance and compatibility changes.
Not much for me to say about this update. A decently big content update. There were plenty of guns added. I don’t think I ever added this many guns to the game at once after this.
Version 3.0 released on Jun 15, 2022
Release notes :All ads have been removed!
Huge UI update - should result in smoother performance overall. Added the most requested gun, the Reaver Vandal. Some sound effects have been fixed-more changes coming soon. KNOWN BUGS : Graphical glitches. Sound effects.
The UI changes were overhauls to the UI images, but the way it works remained the same. I only changed the way the background gun images looked. It is still a background image with transparent buttons leading to each gun scene overlaid on top. The arrangement of everything was adjusted though.
Reception #
At first, the rate of user acquisition for Valorant Gun Simulator was very slow. This can be attributed to the few poor reviews related to the aspect ratio bug. After I fixed this, the rate of user acquisition grew much quicker and eventually balanced out to a linear rate of about 300 downloads a day. The game maintains a 3.9 star average rating despite being a bit dated in terms of content.
Cumulative unique user downloads for Valorant Gun Simulator