Monkey See Monkey Doom Weekly Reflection 8: Designing the Sandbox
Previous Week’s Work
This week I really kicked my work schedule into high gear making it difficult to recount everything I managed to get done over the past 7 days in this post but I will try my best to summarize the biggest developments.
Right after last weeks post I dove back into my player animations and really looked at the individual frames discovering a few errors that I needed to correct. While the forwards and backwards animations required only a quick clean up and the addition of a new frame the left and right cycles had to be redone from scratch based off of a more lively reference. My first walk cycle reference was too stilted and lacked a frame making it jump around and I feel the new cycle both makes the animal catcher feel both more nervous and alive. In addition to the walk cycles I also animated a quick and effective hurt animation for when the player is hit as well as a death animation for when the player loses the game. Overall I am pretty satisfied with how these turned out for the visceral feedback they give the player.
In order to allow the player’s death animation to play out I had to redesign and program a large part of my basic game loop. Before this week once the player died the sprite would immediately be destroyed and the stage would be cleared to restart the game rather abruptly. Now upon death the player sees their character fall over passing out and the game only resets when a button is pressed. While this change may seem minor the sloppy programming work done in the earlier weeks of this project towards the beginning of last semester meant I had to reconfigure many of the steps involved in resetting the game.
Moving back into Illustrator I began designing (and redesigning) the basic level background that could be modified in the game for different levels. Starting with only the vaguest idea of where I wanted things to go based on how I imagined the UI to function in game I created a bunch of failed prototypes that were either unclear UI wise or cluttered gameplay wise. In the end I settled (for now) on a large carpeted room that can be filled with various clothing racks and mannequins to create walls and obstacles for projectiles. I definitely think I have more to go on this front but know that I am getting closer which is keeping me motivated to discover how this thing should really look.
In addition to the background itself I made a few assets that could be used inside the level layouts. Initially I created the male and female mannequins imagining they would wear hats to signify the round type being recorded but realized this was just too unclear for players. I played around with this idea a bunch placing the hat on each of the mannequins by the glass doors but it never seemed to convey what I needed it to elegantly.
Finally abandoning the idea of having the round information be in the room the player moves around in for its lack of clarity I put together a HUD at the bottom the screen that both tells the player the current round but also communicated the current recording type (with both hat and name) as well as the NEXT recording type (with hat and name as well). This is a new addition and I have not tested how well the relevant information is conveyed but I am confident this is really close to a viable solution to this design problem. The game tells the same information to the player this week that it did before but does so with more elegance.
Current State of the Game
Below is a gif showing the current build of Monkey See Monkey Doom. I recorded the Random hat level as an easy way to show the projectile variety(not all levels are nearly this hectic). At the bottom you can see the game’s HUD and if you look closely you will that many of the monkey’s projectiles have special trails. Along with this the monkeys also have a number beneath corresponding to the round they are replaying.
Looking Ahead
I hope to go through the background again in order to get something a bit less blown up and out of place looking. I also may rework the HUD here slightly if need be. In addition to these things I would like to work on the unique projectile sound effects for each projectile type. After that the next big steps will be the monkey animations and creating levels that are bit more interesting than just big empty carpeted squares.
