Long over due, I’m sorry, still better late than never.
My favorite games have always been platformer games. There is something inherently exicting about these kinds of games that require no introduction to trigger. It might be not knowing what is beyond your limited horizontal vision, daunting leaps from platform to platform, or the fast pace that many of these games had
For my final game project I really wanted to make one of these kinds of games. With the limit on the project being that it must be multiplayer, I decided that a racing game would be appropriate. While playing with the idea of a racing platform game, I had a difficult time thinking of what to do to balance the game by giving challenges to the players.
At first I thought of making some sort of system of rewards or powers that the player can accumulate and transfer to the next race. This however, made the games powers too easy to abuse by simply stockpiling powers. I then settled on all the powers being limited use, but that can make the race more difficult for other players. I did this by giving boxes for the player to pickup. These boxes give the player a power that that player can use against other players. These powers target specific players, such as the player in the position above you, below you, the player in 1st place, or all other players. These powers, when used, randomly select an effect, with chances weighed depending on players’ positions. For example the player in last place gets better powers and the player in first gets worse.
These powers are crucial to a challenging race. They can obscure players’ vision, movement, and distort players’ controls. Without this added element, races would be dry and boring. These however are what add the competitive element necessary for a meaningful game.
Coding the game took a lot of time and research. There has been a lot written about making games which use a tile based map system such as mine, but unfortunately, most of them (the good ones anyway) are all written for flash. I had to spend a lot of time getting my system working correctly, and I ended up having to remove some elements of the game that I would have liked to keep in (such as sloped tiles). In the end, the system came out rather robust and well suited to my game, however it is not without some bugs (graphical) and could use optimization.
The art for the game I think might have taken just as long, if not longer. I hadn’t done any sort of pixel art until the last project for this class, and it’s really strange to get used to. It becomes about implying details and getting every pixel in just the right place. I really enjoyed doing the art for this game, especially the caketown logo and the level cakes, but it really took a long time. Overall I’m happy with it though. The music also took awhile, but I’m happy with how that came out too. I think I might have spent a whole day on the caketown song, but I like how it turned out.
The biggest challenges in this project I think were creating the tiling engine and the art assets. Both were incredibly time consuming, but I feel like I learned a lot while doing them, especially the engine. The art was really enjoyable, but ate up a lot of time.
I think what turned out best was the tiling engine and the art. I spent the most time on them but they are what I am most happy with. Also the option in the options menu, go try it, it gives everything a dreamy quality.
What did not turn out the way I wanted it to, or I didn’t have enough time for, was the powerups system, sloped tiles, character options and more levels. I felt like I had to cut a lot from my game that I wanted to put in, and given more time I would have been able to put in a lot more (and I will with the summer).
In the end, I’m happy with how my game turned out. I feel like right now it’s a skeleton of what it could be, and will be. It only has one level at the moment, but everything is there. At this point it’s a matter of using the tools i’ve made for this game and just creating more content. I need to look into optimizing a little bit more (the game got a little slower after adding in all the music and post processing).
Oh and I think for the next project I do I want to work with someone else. I had way too much work for this class this quarter.