Day: December 18, 2017

itch.io link: https://youngjord.itch.io/ldr-sim

in the end I really struggled with the way that I approached this assignment. I should have focused on how mechanics interact with the game environment instead of trying o tell a story through mechanics. For the time period I was given i could not accomplish this to the extent at which i hoped.

This being said, going forwards with this project I would like to further develop the level design to be more mechanically interesting while keeping the fact that they tell a story to the relative level. I also want to develop the characters animations a little more to convey stronger emotions.

I feel that the way the levels progress was the strong point of this game. The difficulty scaling is something that I wanted to make sure was on point. The first level is the first screen going on to more difficult levels that don’t change the end point (being reaching the other player). This creates a simplistic game play that provides a challenge.

I have been really struggling with the overall theme of the game design for this one. I originally wanted to create a classic platformer that has one or two neat mechanics, however I need to challenge myself. I want to create a theme that matches the design of the level.

I want to create a game where the level design tells a story of its own.

I have been struggling with this. I have found a theme that I want to focus on which is inspired by the long distance relationship I have with my girlfriend. I want to take struggles and sayings from this life experience and translate that into a video game. I haven’t found a way to display this within my level design.

So far I have the idea where the two players must work together to reach a common goal: each other, However they affect each others emotional state which is used as a mechanic and changes each character controller. Then the platforms will also be changed by the other player.

I have been working on the animation of each character and I want to focus on making the animation mesh with the style of game play I am designing. Slow and smooth. I want to try to instil the emotions that come with a long distance relationship in the player.

I feel that I am learning a lot about how difficult and time consuming level design can be to get it to the level that I want to achieve.

Itch.io link: https://youngjord.itch.io/gravity-based-shmup

Overall creating this game was very challenging and a lot of fun. I strayed a little from the traditional scrolling shmup, and went for a more arena style shmup. I think that the art style looks great, however it is a copy, so moving forwards I would definitely want to update the art style to be more of my personal style (whatever that may be).

I also ran out of time near the end since I wanted to make the AI more complex than just chasing and shooting or ramming into the player. That is where I spent a lot of my time. Getting the fighter to run away from the player when the player got too close and then shoot at a certain distance was fun but challenging.

What seemed simple at first but ended up being very complicated was the “gravity bomb” weapon that I created. It seemed simple: create and object on top of the player that had an insane amount of gravity to it but didn’t affect the player or the planet. But making it act and look the way that it does took some time, and since the gravity was so strong it made weird interactions with other game elements.

Overall I would like to take more time to implement a health and shield system for the player and expand the size of the game to include more planets and different enemies. The largest change that I want to make is to make the player gain levels and be able to customize/upgrade their ship to become more powerful.

I found a video tutorial showing how to create planetary gravity that uses real world physics and I want to use this in a way to make everything in the shmup environment affected by gravity. The bullets that the ship shoots and the ship itself.

Right now I just have one planet but I want to see if I can create more, however just by adding one other planet my computer slows down when calculating a large number of game objects. So I think that I will just stick to one planet for now.

Art style wise I found a game developer who’s games are similar to what I am trying to accomplish.

https://pixeljam.com/lasthorizon/

I really like the way the planets look in this game and the way that the ship lands is similar to how I would like to code my game.

Their other game nova drift is also visually what I want to try to accomplish however, I would like to make them all on my own and learn how to create an artstyle like that.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1429475366/nova-drift

So now that I have gravity working, I need to spice up the game with a cool art style and make the AI of the enemies challenging enough to make the game and gravity fun.