Weekly Sprint 5: Game Development
This week has been very hectic, but also very successful! To start, my family moved houses this weekend, so we have been very busy packing and unpacking to move into our new home. While this did prevent me from working on my thesis as much as I would have wanted to, I still managed to get some solid work done.
The first task that I worked on this week was curating more research content for my user guide. I focused more on information about our planet Earth and why we need to help pages. Please feel free to view my work here.
My second task was to iterate over the game level design. I realized that my first design for the level was too short and would take the player approximately ten seconds to complete. To make a more in-depth level, I came up with this new design:
I have made a few changes in this level. First, the dark circles are where I plan to place coins to collect. (As a refresher, the coins are used to purchase new characters to play with). I have also introduced a new item to collect, keys! There will be three keys per level that a player can collect. Collecting all three will result in an extra ten coins. I have also introduced new barriers, which are the pointed arrows throughout the level. When a player hits these, they will lose a life. A player will have three lives for the level. Finally, this level is not four stories, imagine cutting each strip and taping them together. The actual level design will be long in width, not height.
I did hit a few blocks this week, but have successfully fixed most of the issues that I was having. The first was that the panda character would ‘stick’ to the coins when they are trying to collect them:
The score would increase by one, but the coins would not disappear. Luckily, I have just accomplished this task before writing this. The second issue is that when I was trying to animate the character walking in the game, they would be moving much faster than a causal trot (which is the goal). So, I am focusing on finalizing the level before venturing into that issue again. For the time being, I have replaced the image with the non-moving sprite.
I have also found a useful character to use for the enemies in the game. As real forests have snakes, I will be using a snake as an enemy in my game as well. I would like to modify the snake color to be red, and I will be working on making the snake images look less pixelated for the final game.
So, while my progress was somewhat slow, I plan on using my time wisely over spring break to finish this forest level by the 22nd so that I can start user testing and tweaking, and begin working on the second and final level.
Happy spring break!
