Raising Cane's Arcade is a mobile app featuring a series of minigames within the one application aimed at promoting the chain with fun activities for children. It introduces a new minigame every few months. 

Each game had the same navigation flow: Tutorial > Gameplay > Leaderboard.

This post talks about the 9 games/activities I was responsible for.

Based on the classic Bubble Shooter. Launch your lemon to make matching clusters and earn points. This game features bonus powerups - Freeze Time and Double-Points. It also includes multi-coloured lemons that act as wildcards, adopting any colour you hit it with.

Pop as many lemons as you can before you're over-run!

A standard Match-3 game. I was able to reuse a lot of code from one of my previous projects for this one. Unique to this game are the powerups - Double Points & Freeze Time. It features match-prediction to offer hints to the player if they're stuck. The board will also shuffle in 2 instances, once at the start of the game if your tiles spawn already matching, or otherwise any other time during play where no actual matches are available.

A take on the classic Snake. Collect books to build your tail. Be careful not to crash into walls or your own tail!

One of the interesting challenges in this was to keep movement smooth while also having instant response-time. You can't move instantly, you'd end up out-of-line with the grid. This was not so much a problem in more classic formats where your sprites moved an entire tile at a time.

I researched around and tried to read how others had solved this, only to find that a lot of people sharing their work didn't seem to even recognize the problem, let alone solve it, settling for snappy inputs, desynched snake-tails or doing away with grid-alignment for convenience.

Google has a version of the game available to play for free directly within their search engine and it had the exact behaviour I was after, just no write-ups available to learn from. I basically just played it a lot to try and understand how they got such smooth movement.

It all comes down to whether an input is placed before or after the snake reaches the center of a tile. If before, the snake won't turn yet, he will only turn after reaching the center of the tile. This actually allows the player to change their mind and provide an updated input, and the snake does actually turn fast enough that you otherwise don't notice the delay. If you input AFTER the snake has already crossed the center of the tile, then you have no choice but to snap him into his new direction, but you need to do so while keeping the distance he has already covered, and also updating a few of the books following behind him.

This was probably all TL;DR, but suffice to say I'm glad I got it all working smoothly by the end.

A standard trivia game. Kids can choose to play as 1 of 3 characters from Raising Cane's mascot lineup.

I feel fortunate that one of Raising Cane's collaborators was Peanuts. This was one of 2 projects from that collaboration. A rhythm game with 3 jazz arrangements of Christmas songs to play through.

I didn't use beat-detection for this, rather each note has a unique float value (time) assigned to it. However, I didn't manually input those time values.

I setup a special scene in Unity where I had developed a tool that would respond to 1 of 4 keys on my keyboard. When I hit play, the song would play, I'd press keys to the rhythm, that key-press would then be recorded on a timeline and this is how I assigned time values for each note. 

I'm an amateur musician at best though and had to adjust some notes afterwards. I had another special scene in unity that was not for recording, but for editing. I would open that scene and my editor scripts would layout a full array of notes from one of my recording sessions, I could then hit play to edit the song in realtime. I included the ability to scrub and also select notes to change which difficulty setting they appeared in. Notes with white-casing were intended for Easy mode, black-casing for Medium (which included easy notes as well), and Hard mode naturally included all notes so had no special colour.

Based on classic Chinese sliding block puzzles. Arrange tiles to make a complete picture. This game was our second from the Raising Cane's collaboration with Peanuts.

There are 4 images to choose from as well as the 3 grid-levels.

- Easy (2x2)

- Medium (3x3)

- Hard (4x4)

I had to learn the patternistic approach to solving this so that I could test it effectively. Once you know the solution it's very easy.

This game is based on classic catching games like Avalanche (1978 Atari). In this game you must catch ingredients for lemonade, avoiding anything that shouldn't be in lemonade. Fill your pitcher, only then can you gain a point. Catching the wrong objects will empty your pitcher before you manage to fill it. Catch 4 UNIQUE ingredients for a score bonus.

Flick your animals through the hoops to earn points. Bonus power-ups include Freeze Time & Double-Points.

As this game is completely 2D, depth is faked using scale. Animals shrink to emulate depth. If they land beneath the hills they'll continue to fall off-screen, however if they land above the hills, they'll land on their feet and walk off-screen either left or right, whichever is closer.

There was also an AR version of this same game if you happened to have Raising Cane's printed AR target available. I believe it came on the dine-in trays if you ate at their restaurant. In this game you would get points for landing your animal on any of the available targets within the time-limit.

Lastly there is Canemoji Camera. This is a photo activity where you take a photo of yourself, then apply any number of stickers over top. Each sticker is animate and can be repositioned, rotated or scaled with touchscreen gestures. More stickers would unlock if you scanned one of their printable AR targets which were found in-stores.

Once you're done applying animated stickers, a small 2 second gif would be recorded and stored to your device to send to friends.