DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK - 1 10 seconds

First post of 2019 hello everyone :)

It's been the first week of 3rd year and yep really feeling it already 😓

Let me introduce you to the first task- Game a week. With this week's theme being "10 Seconds"

Idea: A russian roulette styled finger guillotine where the player will pick one rope at a time and try not to make the blade fall (gameover). 10 secs will put pressure on the player to pick something.

Concept Art~

Original Visual sketch before pixel art

Reflection:

This game was (almost) what I wanted, but definitely out of my limited coding knowledge. But a prototype is a prototype. For me the easiest part was creating the art as I am more of an artist than a coder but i tried my best with a bit of help. I made sure to get what i knew out of the way first, setting the ingame cursor - since this game would be running on cursor controls (point and click) rather than key movements like in my past games/experience. Secondly I got the click to destroy function down, this function would ensure that visually the game would destroy the rope when "cut"(clicked). I made sure that when drawing the design up that the controls/colliders would be either numbers or little pluses below the guillotine machine as placing the colliders on the ropes themselves could make the player misclick due to the designs rope spacing's. My game's main mechanic was the most problematic and required the most assistance. For the games main mechanic I needed the resulting rope clicks to have one that triggered game over. This was difficult as I had never tried making a randomized event situation before. It would be a pretty cool mechanic if better used in a more graphical context. The next problem encountered was the gameover pop up it took a few tries before finding the cause of the errors and a few change ups of lines of code before it was functioning as wished. To not show when the game initializes first but to show when the random rope was clicked (different every round, and completely chance). From then on the rest was pretty smooth - I made sure to implement a countdown that counted down the milliseconds from 10 to 0 as well as a easy restart button for the player to click when they perished. Overall this game was a challenge most definitely due to my limited knowledge but I have most certainly learnt a lot from making it. If I were to polish it up in future, I would potentially add more pop ups - for the event of the player winning by not cutting the game over rope, as well as general things such as sounds, better animations etc.

I still have much to learn.