Even if you don’t know who Luke Muscat is, you probably played at least one of his hits like Fruit Ninja. The mobile games industry veteran has now decided to become a solo developer, documenting his new journey online.
Luke Muscat started his gamedev career back in 2007 as a designer at Australia-based Halfbrick Studios, which is known for Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja. He then co-founded his own studio Prettygreat, before joining Snap as head of design for the company’s gaming division. He worked there for the last four years and left in June 2022.
Muscat uploaded the first video to his YouTube channel on August 17 (thanks to Simon Carless for highlighting it in the latest GameDiscoverCo newsletter).
“I created Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and have shipped over a dozen other games,” he said at the beginning of the video. “But I’ve always wanted to try an ultimate challenge — building a game all on my own.”
“It couldn’t be a better time to [quit my job],” Muscat ironically noted, given the global economic turmoil and expected recession.
For his new video, the veteran developer showed the process of creating a game prototype. He took one of this year’s biggest indie hits Vampire Survivors and combined it with Crash Club, a car combat game he made at Prettygreat.
The idea was to mix the hordes of enemies with physics-based gameplay. So, first things first, Muscat had to make a simple car model and apply the right physics settings to it. He then went through other development stages like AI logic, adding weapons, building the map, making new enemy cars, creating the perk system, doing art stuff, and even adding a sword to a car (yes, you read it right).
Muscat called this prototype Sir Truck, which can be downloaded on itch.io for free. Of course, it is not perfect and is far from a complete game, but the whole point was to show the prototyping process that is an integral part of game development.
The full video, which might be really useful for people interested in game design, can be watched below.