GAMES DEVELOPMENT EXERCISES

00/04/2023 - 00/00/2023 (Week 01 - Week 00)
ALICIA TENG YI LING / 0345159 / BDCM
GAMES DEVELOPMENT
EXERCISES

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Week 01 Exercise: Game Review

Todo:

• Analyse and review a game from Taylor's Seniors

Process

To start off, I went around Taylor's GameDevZone and started playing several games. For the purpose of this exercise, I decided to go with the one that stuck at the most to me - 

Chosen game: "Reaper Test" by Sam Mun Hoe.

This side-scrolling game requires the player to make use of their skills and reflexes to complete three levels. The controls are using the A and D key or left and right arrow button + spacebar to jump.

Fig 1.1 Reaper Test by Sam Mun Hoe

Art

Pros:

• Smooth animation for character movement and scythe moves
• Cute character design + enemy mob design
• Nice use of particle effects for environment ambience! (the smoke)
• Consistent art style

Cons:

• Personally, the background while dark and matching in colour scheme, felt a little bit out of place compared to the rest of the game art
• Some assets like the pumpkins and spike traps are not vectorised which results in blurry, low resolution images

Controls

Pros:

• I like the fact that changing between tapping or holding the spacebar affects the duration and distance of the character's jumps
• Intuitive

Cons:

• The speed of running and jumping feels quite fluctuant and takes a while to get accustomed to and may throw beginners off from completing the later levels

Fig 1.2 Character Movement Controls

Gameplay

Pros:

• Gameplay is challenging but not overly hard - enough to make you feel a satisfying sense of accomplishment once you complete it
• Varying abilities needed for different levels makes it more engaging
• Fighting game, obstacle skills + slight puzzle solving skills needed to passthrough
• Includes both melee (close up) and range fighting moves for mobs and puzzles
• Range requires a charge up from mob deaths and cannot be used recklessly
• Different types of enemy mobs (both land and flying) and require slightly different approaches
• Interesting storyline

Cons:

• Kiting enemies is a little janky
• I might not be used to the gameplay style yet but I felt that my weapon sometimes passed through without dealing damage (I need to get used to the hitboxes)
• I felt that at certain points, flying mobs got stuck on platforms and were unable to attack me which made for easy kills

Fig 1.3 Gameplay Attack Instructions

Sound Design

Pros:

• I love the OST

Cons:

• The soundtrack does not loop seamlessly
• I wish there was more SFX when the character dies, gets hit or fails the level
• Not a huge con, but no mob injury noises - silent dying 

Implementation

Pros:

• I believe it was well executed and a fulfilling strategic platform game that requires the user's to use several skills, both tactical and mental which leads to higher player engagement
• Unity is impressive!

Cons:

• The square hitboxes around circular obstacle courses threw me off at first and took a while to be able to gauge where I would be reset and where I could pass through safely
• I released that if you walk back to an old checkpoint despite passing a later one, it resets he character back to the previous one which is not fun if you struggled a lot to make it to that point

Fig 1.4 Platform Levels with spike traps

Conclusion

It was an incredibly fun game. So much so that I completed it several times over and posted the finishing certificate below. I'm honestly a little scared considering I've never fully delved into the mechanics of game development and the fact that I am to complete something similar in the span of fourteen weeks is nerve wrecking. 

Fig 1.5 Completion Cert for a Certified Grim Reaper!

Week 02 Exercise: Game Ideation

Todo:

• In a group, using 'Scamper' or '3(i)', come up with a game idea
• Include story
• Include gameplay

Process

In this week's class, Mr. Razif started off with a lecture regarding ways you can ideate games. Afterwards, once we were all grouped up, we started talking about which 2D platformer games we knew. 

Alicia - Hollow Knight 

Vernice - Cookie Run 

Ataka - Terraria 

Shaocheng - Soul Knight 

Huilin - Plants vs Zombies

Initially, we decided to go with Terraria as it was the game that the majority of us knew. However, after thinking we realised that it had an abundance of lore and game mechanics that we were unsure of how to base the game idea from. Ataka then suggested we do a classic game, Fireboy & Watergirl (Temple Edition). Finally, we started forming ideas as to what we could implement. Mostly the "Adapt" method from the Scamper strategy and "Improve" + "Incorporate" from the 3(i) strategy. The concept of the story would remain roughly the same, except we changed the characters (and their names) so that they would have powers and fighting abilities. 

I'd say the biggest changes would probably be the introduction of fighting mechanics, elemental powers as well as limiting the chances players can take to pass the level. To add balance to the game, we added collectables for health and while the base game seemed familiar still, we somehow ended up with a fantasy, puzzle game with enemy mobs.  We took inspiration from "Soul Knight" and "Hollow Knight" for some of the ideation for fighting skills and also the above game from Exercise 1, "Reaper Test" for avoiding mob obstacles.

Fig 2.1 Final Game Presentation Slides

Week 04 Exercise: Learning Unity 2D Core

In this class, to start off we used 2D sprites and learnt how add gravity to the character and make the floor so that objects would not fall through using rigid body 2D and capsule collider 2D. We were then encouraged to play around with tilting the floor to understand the gravity. 

We then were tasked to create a sort of catapult and by testing weight and object mass, launch the object into a wall of blocks and knock it down.

Following this, we delved into velocity for move speed, and jump speed of the character.

Finally, we learnt how to use an 'empty' as a 'trigger' so that the character can only double jump and is unable to have unlimited jumps which is useful for certain game rules and mechanics. The unlimited jumps would be a better choice if the game is such like "Flappy Bird" but I believe in a 2D platformer game, the double jump is wiser for player difficulty.  

Fig 3.1 Exercise in Unity Interface

Attributes learnt:

• Physics 2D
• Box Collider 2D
• Capsule Collider 2D
• Circle Collider 2D
• Rigid Body 2D (for gravity interactable behaviour)

Fig 3.2 Snippet of the Code for this Exercise

Overall, it was an extremely fun class and I enjoyed learning the basics of game dev. Unfortunately, as I kept moving through the exercise, I couldn't capture the entirety of what I did for this exercise, except for the final results which is shown below. 

Screen Capture Video of Exercise

Fig 3.3 Week 04 Unity 2D Core Exercise