exercises
0344034.
BDCM
.Games Development
::exercises
week[1]: Game Review
todo:
- Review a game from Taylor's seniors
process:
The game I spent the most time on from Taylor's "GameDevZone" is 'Reaper Test' by Sam Mun Hoe. It's a side-scrolling, platformer game following our main protagonist — Kuro.
TL;DR I am convinced that it is unbeatable.
Art
pros:
- Consistent art style.
- Varying.
- A good mix of clean illustrations & grungy textures, with variations on tile edges & innards.
cons:
- Certain assets that should be vectorised are low-resolution raster images (eg. spikes, pumpkins).
- Animations should be eased instead of tweening in linear time.
- Lack of attack & damage-received animation reduces the impact & significance of such events to the player.
- The HUD is very wonky (eg. stretched & pixelated asset for health bar, misaligned "HP:" & "Energy:").
Controls
pros:
- Intuitive.
- Basically the same as any normal PC game.
cons:
- Camera easing creates false illusion of a ramp in velocity when jumping & walking.
- Hard falloff for inertia after jumping & walking.
Gameplay
pros:
- Fun.
- Majority of game is challenging enough that any one would have some good fun.
- Clever use of energy for multiple gameplay elements.
- Distance of obstacles from source when pushed, is dependent on range attack proximity.
- "Secret areas".
- Good for replay-ability, satisfying when it gives additional game-extending points to player.
cons:
- Level state isn't fully reset on death; some things are unexpectedly retained (eg. energy levels, moved boulders, positions of moving platforms).
- This creates situations where soft-locks are possible & is a very crude solution to being more forgiving.
- Difficulty ramps up way too quickly at the end.
- A few people other than me tried the game, they weren't able to get through the last level either.
Sound
pros:
- Sick OST.
cons:
- OST doesn't repeat seamlessly.
- Harsh cutoff for attacking SFX.
- Lack of SFX when jumping, falling, & dying.
Implementation
pros:
- Unity WASM always tickles my brain.
cons:
- Checkpoints are not cascading.
- A person can walk into a preview check point zone & begin respawning there.
- Since checkpoint zones were designed to be non-notifying, this can be extremely punishing & disorienting.
- Hitboxes are WHACK (eg. round spikes have square hitboxes).
- This contributes significantly to the whiplash-inducing difficulty ramp at the tail-end of the level.
Conclusion
I surprisingly enjoyed the whole experience, just extremely disappointed that I wasn't able to finish the game. Overall whilst there were things that could've been improved, I think the game as a whole is a great place to start & extremely impressive for one person & 14 weeks of learning.
week[2]: Game Ideation
todo:
- Come up with a game idea in a group
process:
Mr. Razif gave a lecture in the beginning of the class on a few methods one can use to ideate games.
Figure 1.1.1, Week 2 lecture slides, 9/9/2022
We started throwing ideas around, going based on the "Inverse" method from the 3(I) strategy, as well as the concept of the Mario saving the princess, spoken about briefly during the lecture. This started us out with a game where we play as Bowser trying to catch Princess Peach. This idea then drew similarities from "Subway Surfers", which we then inversed one more time, ending us up with a game where we play as the guard chasing the surfer.
As we discussed, we played around with the idea, even touching on switching to the trainmaster as the playable character. At the end, we landed on a game that retains the infinite runner nature of "Subway Surfers" whilst inverting the goal as well as collectables.
Figure 1.1.2, Final designed game presentation, 9/9/2022
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