Monkey See Monkey Doom Weekly Reflection 5: Bananas and Hats

Previous Week’s Work

Work this week was mostly focused on designing and implementing assets to denote the different types of enemies within the game. As has been described in my previous posts my game features a variety of enemy types that differ in how they move and how they attack the player, these differences being noted in their headwear. In order to make this work I had to script a few new functions into my enemy prefabs and bullet prefabs that enabled them to choose a sprite from an array based on the round type being replayed.

After enabling the monkeys to have hats and shoot sprites I spent most of my time creating 8 hats and 8 projectile types. I also made a slight modification to the monkey character (specifically the size of his head compared to his body) and made major changes to the player character in order to make him more readable and distinct from the monkeys running around him.

A final change made to the game this week was replacing the grey and orange boxes to be destroyed in each round with two assets that more closely follow the aesthetic style I have been working towards with each of my sprites. Players now use their regular bullets to destroy hat boxes and their special bullets to destroy the crown cases. A much smaller change involved limiting how many boxes spawn to never pass 10 in order to keep the experience readable.

Current State of the Game

After implementing all of my new assets I took this screenshot of one of my four working prototype levels featuring the exploding enemy type and the shield enemy type. I removed the paper texture background and have yet to replace it with something more fitting but I feel that the game is starting to feel aesthetically consistent.

I feel some of my assets (like the crown and the basic banana) might need to be changed to make them more readable for playability purposes but overall the look of the game is coming out much cleaner than I thought it would and I feel proud.

Looking Ahead

The week ahead will involve completing the remaining hat and projectile sprites for the remaining enemy types in the game. I’m not sure how I will denote to the player the functionality of these more esoteric enemy types but below are some design ideas:

• Drone Type: Witch hat (shoots protective ghosts)
• Reverse Type: Backwards hat (shoots bananas)
• Shotgun Type: Hunter Cap (shoots shotgun shell colored bananas??)
• Machine Gun Type: Rambo style bandana (shoots light brown bananas??)
• Random Type: A sloppy stack of hats (shoots all other projectile types)
• Blank Type: Undecided

Once all of these assets are complete I can begin actually organizing the UI to better reflect the levels I have in the game at this time.