Monkey See Monkey Doom Weekly Reflection 6: Getting Things Done…Again
Previous Week’s Work
This week I dedicated most of my week to undoing what I did last week. Sometimes you make something and it just doesn’t work they way you envisioned it and this describes a lot of the designs I came up with last week, particularly in the projectile department. In this post I will attempt to explain the issues with my previous set of assets before walking through the design philosophy of the new projectiles in the game.
Looking at my last post, readers will see a unique projectile type for each special attack. The idea behind this was to match the special attacks with the hats in order to create consistency and I threw myself into the work coming up with (mildly) clever banana based projectiles for the player to avoid. The issue to this approach was that it was simply confusing overkill. What I mean by this is that in a game in which there can be sometimes dozens of projectiles on the screen at once, having to sort between 15 possible projectile types is simply a daunting and unintentionally distracting task.
By round 20 I found myself really struggling to avoid the dangerous projectiles because my collection of sprites had become needlessly overdesigned. The worst consequence of this was that the projectiles that NEEDED to stand out (the extra damage object, the healing object) failed to do so in the sea of sprites. At this point I made the tough decision to scrap most of the designs I had spent the past week on and returned to the drawing board.
The most immediate solution came with poop flinging, specifically the poop sprite replacing all other moving 1 damage projectiles within the game. This solution both clears up confusion for the player on what to avoid (its far more intuitive to avoid poop than bananas) and fixes the problem of over design. If two projectiles that fire in a different pattern do the same damage making these patterns vastly different sprites only hurts the player’s knowledge of the game by overloading them with information.
Below you can see the new projectile sprites. The top row features the dangerous objects players should avoid while the second row contains player power ups to be grabbed. I attempted to make banana sprites helpful. Another change this week was making the two player projectile types more distinct.
In addition to all the projectile work I also finished the hats that the monkey enemies wear. Each sprite now has a white sticker outline which I think creates a more distinct look to the game.
Current State of the Game
Below are two current screenshots of Monkey See Monkey Doom. While the changes I described above might seem granular I think in the end the game looks cleaner and will be more fair as a result of my changes. The image on the left showcases a level with landmine placing enemies and blank firing enemies while that on the right shows a level with healing and extra damage enemies.
In total the game now has 8 prototypical levels that will be complete once they have slightly different arena layouts. 7 of the 8 levels feature 2 unique enemy types while the final level features the random enemy type that guarantees a difficult and chaotic experience.
Looking Ahead
Over spring break I would like to get one set of animations done either for the player or the enemies. I don’t consider myself an animator and understand that this will be a lengthy process most likely. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen with animations I will be sure to document here next week.
Another important aspect of the game to get completed is that of distinct level layouts based around the game’s theme. I imagine this game taking place inside a clothing store and need to design level obstacles according to that theme.
