DIGD701 Game a week: WEEK 7 Custom Theme

so... I might've fallen ill with the flu halfway making this game. 

But as far as illness goes here's what I have, started off strong ended a bit weak both literally and physically.



Custom theme: "A war game where you explore temples with bioterrorism" 



Bioterrorism = plagues, organic infectiousness = rats carry plague. You are a rat. 

Sent into an ancient temple by the outbreak of war, you are forced to explore and plague this dusty tomb and collect treasure. 

What we have in the end:
- A working pause menu with three functional buttons, Restart level, Quit and resume. This UI is summoned when the ESC key is pressed
- Tiles
- A player that can be controlled with both WASD and the arrows + space
- A fully animated player that plays an "Idle" animation while not moving and walking when walking
- A virtual camera that follows the player "spotlighting the player while walking"

What fell through:
- Sometimes the player gets stuck on platforms due to the collision boxes ground check and height check can escape this by jump
- Jump speed is really quick for some reason? there is a double jump but some platforms are hard to reach but are POSSIBLE
- A collection system for the gems in the treasure rooms, script gave me an error :T fatigue got the best of me though so I couldn't fix this
- the scene appeared completely blacked out by design when playing in unity but shows a black box because the camera has zoomed out?
- torch tiles on walls don't light up

The process of making:

All art and coding were done by me within photoshop with an exception of the rat itself.
This was a bought pixel art asset from https://elthen.itch.io/2d-pixel-art-rat-sprites

In class exercise: Accessing game Information

Chose a game, find or take a screenshot of the core gameplay. (i.e. not from a cutscene, but when the player is actually playing)

Dissect the screenshot discussing your understanding of the information layer present in the game.
What will a player be able to understand from what the designers have presented with?

DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK 6 ALT controls

For this week the theme was ALT controls. This introduced us to a series of games that did not follow traditional controls such as WASD and arrows. You could either take this as a chance to be creative or let's be honest... over complicate controls that really don't need it. I suppose this does add a layer of difficulty though. Nonetheless, I present to you this week's collab game "Climb!". I must admit on my partner's behalf that this weeks theme was a bit tricky to come up a game for. We decided on a climbing style game which ended up being a more difficult doodle jump looking layout.

What we have in the end:
- A working menu with two functional buttons, one to play and one to quit
- A seamless background that stays no matter how high the player gets
- A logo for our game
- A starting platform that destroys after the next platform group spawns
- A player that uses key combinations to control SR, SL, and DJ
- Auto jump and option to double jump via key combo
- 3 different types of platforms, regular, moving and destroy after a jump
- groups move down as the player jumps up which gives the illusion of climbing

What fell through:
- Platform groups occasionally spawn too high up - hence why we created a double jump function
- no scoring system implemented
- disappearing platforms destroy too quickly despite the player not having stood on it





The process of making:

The background art. title sequence and code bug fixes were implemented by Julianna.
Quit button function and Game Over screen completed by Julianna

Major coding was done by myself, it was amazing to see the game to come together. Although I did come across one frustrating issue when coding this week. At first, when I finished coding the group spawning, the groups would not move down as the player jumped >:( however, this problem seems to have been fixed in our final build. Overall this week has been pretty successful with only one or two bugs. It was interesting to learn how to code the auto jump as well as getting to know how to use different scenes to operate the different windows (Menu). Making the different platforms was also interesting to create, especially the moving platforms which randomize in speed. The platform art was an asset from an old game I made back in the first year and was still relevant for this project so I used that and just put hue shifts on the special platforms with the regular platforms staying the same color unchanged.