Weekly Sprint 6: Onward!
Spring break proved to be a very successful time to work on my project. While I was able to go skiing on ice covered mountains in Vermont, I was also able to complete a lot of my project! Of course, with that progress came a lot of bugs as well, so my Trello board has changed a lot over the past two weeks.
I started with completely re-creating the forest level in GameMaker. It is now a longer course, and it is also more difficult than the first iteration was. This will help to keep players engaged while they are playing, without making it too easy to complete. One interesting challenge that I came across was the spacing of the platforms throughout the game. When I would start to demo my game to see how it was working, there were times were the platforms were unreachable. This will continue to be an ongoing challenge as I add or change the course, and will be one of the first questions that I ask in my user testing.
The second task that I started to work on was the structure of how the user would navigate throughout the video game. This included the mini game room, the main menu, the user guide/how to play, and how I was going to display facts about the dangers of the planet before and after each level. I discovered that the use of rooms was one way to make all of this possible. After many tutorials, I was able to develop a main menu structure:
Obviously, this will need to be spruced up a little, but this is secondary compared to the actual levels.
The last few things that I did with the forest level was animate the character so that they move while playing. There is an idle mode and a walking mode. I was also able to make the snake enemies move back and forth on their platforms without falling off. The score increases as coins are collected, and lives decrease when hit by an enemy.
The third thing that I did was actually work ahead of my timeline and start on the snake mini-game. While this puts my forest level behind schedule, it makes the snake level ahead of schedule, which I was supposed to finish in the middle of April. The timeline is always changing! Overall, this game is almost finished. While I still need to develop the robot sprite and the garbage piece sprite, the controls are fully functional and the score increases as the user collects the pieces.
While there was a lot of progress on my game, there are still quite a few bugs that I need to work on.
For the main game:
- Game pause does not work.
- When hitting an enemy, the lives decrease really quickly, rather than the character recoiling and only one life is decreased.
- Collecting the key adds ten points to the score, but the key does not appear in the HUD (heads up display — where the score and hearts are found).
- The spikes do not affect the player yet.
- The wall jumps do not send the player out horizontally, instead, they can just ‘magically ascend the wall,’ which is not the intended experience.
For the mini-game:
- The snake stops moving on pause, but does not continue after un-pause.
- Sprite creation for robot and the garbage pieces.
Finally, I worked on my ebook for a little bit until I kept running into some major issues. The Canva software that I was using was really good at first, but it would frequently need to refresh and delete my progress, even after I had saved my work. So, I came to the decision that I will need to create my user guide in Microsoft Publisher instead, and publish it in PDF form online for the showcase. Publisher is a new software for me, but it a tool that is basically like Word, only focused more on page layout and composition rather than text.
Ethics
My senior project is focused around environmental ethics. You may be asking yourself, ‘what are environmental ethics?’ In the media, there are many topics of environmental ethical conversation. These include the following questions:
- Should humans continue to clear cut forests for the sake of human consumption?
- Why should humans continue to propagate its species, and life itself?
- Should humans continue to make gasoline-powered vehicles?
- What environmental obligations do humans need to keep for future generations?
- Is it right for humans to knowingly cause the extinction of a species for the convenience of humanity?
- How should humans best use and conserve the space environment to secure and expand life?
In my project, I address some of these issues by presenting facts about the environment, featured habitats, and featured species throughout the game. These facts are meant to start the player thinking about the implications that we as a species are leaving in our path as we continue to use and destroy our natural resources. At the same time, the games are designed so that the objective of each game is focused on a real — world solutions that environmental advocates are promoting. For example, the mini-game is set on a beach. Beaches are some of the most polluted habitats on Earth, with the majority of pollution coming from plastic trash that fills the ocean water. The mini — game objective is to collect the garbage pieces off of the beach, promoting the cleaning of this habitat that will (hopefully) inspire the players to start to notice these dangers in their everyday lives outside of the screen.
