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Assignment 3 Postmortem

On the whole I am fairly happy with how Kitty Krusade turned out, even though it was missing a lot of the features we initially wanted to implement. There were several flaws with the final product -- but that’s the point of working on a basic demo to strengthen our playtesting skills, isn’t it? 

I think the most major problem with the game was bugs brought up by playtesters that I mention below -- several of them felt as though they were impossible to fix -- the sticky platforms in particular, though it was also very difficult to get the model of the character to behave in the way that I had initially envisioned. 

I really enjoyed the playtesting process, though -- some of the flaws with the game would have been difficult to articulate on my own, and I think that if I moved forward with development on Kitty Krusade there are several things that I would change. I would keep the general aesthetic, which I think was a strength (this is reflected in the feedback from our playtesters), but make the game focus entirely on platforming, rather than having many enemies at all. I would also implement some more story elements into the game -- which we intended to do with the cat NPC pictured above, though this was eventually cut for time. 

On the whole, while I am not satisfied with the final product (which is my own fault) I think that working on Kitty Krusade was overall a valuable experience. I enjoyed working with my group, and would happily work with them again in the future. It also gave me some insight into how I would run a playtesting process -- I think providing players with a more complete demo to begin with would be a significant improvement on what I did here. In addition to this I think I would like to be in the same room as players -- this would enable me to get more feedback visually, rather than verbally.

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Assignment 3 Playtesting

This is a screenshot of Cherie’s one-sheet, and visually it looks how we wanted our final product to. Unfortunately I could not replicate this for our final assignment, and I think that it suffers for it. 

Our playtests revealed several flaws in our game that I overlooked or was unable to fix in its development. The first of these was that there was no killbox when the player fell from the bottom platform -- while I could have added a block at the bottom of the map that reset the player to their spawn position, I did not think of this until after the playtesting had already begun. 

Another common issue players had while playtesting Kitty Krusade was that some of the platforms were sticky -- they were unable to move while on them, and could instead only jump. This obviously presents a major problem in a game in a genre where jumping is the main mechanic, and it often has to be done with a good deal of precision. This, combined with the lack of a killbox, made for a frustrating gameplay experience for several of our playtesters. 

There were also several other bugs, like slimes not damaging the player, and occasional teleporting across platforms. I think that this is likely due to the way the platforms were implemented -- while I made sure that each lined up pixel-perfectly, the fact that they were several individual blocks rather than one lone one is likely the issue, although I could not stretch one without severely altering the texture unfortunately. 

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Assignment 3 Development Progress, Assignment 3 Team Discussion

I have joined a team with Jacob, Guy and Cherie for Assessment 3 of IGB220. We have decided to focus on Cherie’s submission for Assessment 2 to develop, that being Kitty Krusade. I’m glad we’ve chosen to work on a platformer together, as it is definitely the genre I’ve got the most experience with out of the three we’ve worked on so far -- I did not particularly enjoy working on the asteroids clone upon reflection, and while I liked the racing game I think it is something I would rather work in on my own time.

We have also decided to focus on adding ranged attacks to Kitty Krusade, although I’m not entirely sure how difficult these will be to implement -- presumably a lot like the sauce on the sauce bottle in Burger Panic, although I don’t necessarily know if that will work particularly well. We’ll see!  

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Racing Postmortem, Ass 2 final design

Work on Cycling Is A Prison definitely slowed over the last week -- I struggled to find motivation to finish it, as well as struggling with implementing some of the mechanics like the wind. Using a command like ‘simulate key press ‘<--’ ‘-->’ did not feel quite the way I would have liked it to, and the result was more frustrating than fun unfortunately. As such the game remains unfinished, although it is something that I would like to get back to after the semester is over because I think it is a genuinely fun concept -- which is something that I’m happy with after struggling to make Burger Panic a fun game in any way. 

Regarding the Assignment 2 final design, the One Page is pictured below and remains almost unchanged from that design, and I don’t want to clutter my blog up too much with duplicated pictures. 

I quite like the one sheet, although I wish I had remained more consistent with the colour scheme and overall vibe of the one page. I also regret the font choice for the body of the one sheet -- I think it’s too bold and looks ugly as a result. I also wish I had chosen more engaging pictures rather than the one I used here -- there is too much dead space when later in the level is significantly more exciting visually, although that is an unfortunate consequence of not being able to run GDevelop properly without it crashing on the ancient laptop I had to use to create the one sheet.  

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Racing Development, Assignment 2 Progress

Development of Cycling Is A Prison is going moderately well -- so far I have managed to implement the cyclist, cars, enemy cyclists, and people, as well as the road for the game to take place on.

The next steps are as follows: Make car doors open at random instances, taking up another of the four lanes of the road; add more obstacles or make the current obstacles appear more frequently; and to introduce a fun and potentially frustrating mechanic of wind -- a wind blowing either east or west will blow the cyclist one lane over (much like in real life). 

Assignment 2 is also coming along well -- I have managed to complete the One-Page, which is attached below. 

I am not particularly happy with the item pictures, but I am still working on the pixel art of the final designs that would be included in the game. As placeholders they are perfectly fine, but I do not necessarily want to implement items in this visual style. 

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Asteroids Postmortem, Racing Pitch

I really enjoyed the time I spent working on Burger Panic, but there were a few things that I was not satisfied with in the final product. The first of these things was the difficulty level -- the game was too easy and imbalanced. I continued work on the game with the asteroids only spawning in the grill pans, and I think that was a mistake -- it made the game more of a clicker type game than anything fun or actually meaningful. 

Something else that I was unsatisfied with was my inability to implement non-destructible features like the lettuce -- I could not figure out a way to make them damage the player if they strayed too far while also remaining within the bounds of the screen. 

Racing Pitch

The player controls a cyclist that is racing down the road. The cyclist must avoid common obstacles -- cars, other cycles, and people walking horizontally across the road. If a person is hit, the cyclist will be slowed down, where if a car is hit the cyclist will restart the level. Hitting other cyclists will actually increase the speed of the character. They will also gather speed as they progress through the level, making the difficulty of the game rise incrementally. 

Something from Chapter 9 of the Fullarton book that would have strongly benefitted Burger Panic is playtesting -- particularly the method described in the chapter, with an intro, discussion, play session and review. I think I got a little too caught up in what I was making and didn’t zoom out to ask myself if the game was actually fun or not -- I was more focussed on finishing it than anything. Maybe someone could have told me that it wasn’t fun! 

I also really enjoyed reading about the changes made to the game Crackdown, a game I remember playing when I was 10 or 11; the idea that they managed to cut the time the player had the most fun down from three hours to thirty minutes is really interesting -- obviously being a superhero game the player wants to feel as powerful as possible, so it makes a lot of sense that making that early in the game would be a good way to go, particularly when you can presumably just bump the health and damage of the enemies up later in the game to have some degree of difficulty.

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Asteroids Development Post

Development of Burger Panic is coming along quite well. I adjusted the spaceship to be a sauce bottle (although my pixel art skills are quite limited) and the bullets to look more like tomato sauce. Obviously sauce more typically looks like a stream, I didn’t want to change the firerate too much because it would make the game too easy. 

I also think creating the background in the way that I did was somewhat of a mistake, because while the burgers can some from anywhere, it limits the game’s ability to represent real life in the way that I had originally intended. The reason for this problem is that I have not yet been able to figure out a good way to represent the already-cooked burgers on a bun in a way that plays like an asteroids game. 

I intend to add a few more features to the game -- as well as figuring out a way to rejig the background to make it more like a restaurant, rather than just a grill, I would like to add different types of ‘asteroid’, maybe including some non-destructible obstacles like lettuce or similar, in order to add some more challenge to the game. 

Something that ties in to the Fullarton chapter on Conceptualisation was my initial idea for this game -- I frankly have no idea where it came from. I don’t think it was a dormant idea in the back of my mind. There was no a-ha! moment coming up with it -- I wasn’t thinking ‘hmm, what should my asteroids game be’ while eating a burger. I don’t think I’ve ever even played a cooking game -- minigames in Pokemon or Breath of the Wild, sure, but that hardly counts. And I think it shows in the development of this game to this point -- I think going forward I need to put more effort into the conceptualisation process so that I can have a more clear idea of what I want the project to be going into it, rather than essentially making it up as I go along. 

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Platformer Postmortem/Asteroids Pitch

On the whole I was not particularly happy with how my platformer ended up. While I got all of the required functionality working, as well as the double-jump, it did not feel particularly good to play. This was reflected in the playtesting I did for the game, where both players, while liking the idea, didn’t overly see the point in playing it. 

Asteroids Pitch

Title: Burger Panic

The game I intend to create for the asteroids section of the class will centre around a hamburger restaurant. The player will control a bottle of tomato sauce -- the asteroids will instead be replaced by sauceless burgers (disgusting), or even small fires on the grill (it’s well known that fires can be put out with sauce).  

The controls will focus on WASD for movement, with the player being able to press Space to shoot. 

The setting is the first unique selling point -- I don’t think I’ve ever played a fully fledged game in this sort of setting, let alone in an asteroids style rather than as a management sim.

Burgers will increase in frequency and speed as the game goes on.

If the player takes too long to put out the fires, the room will begin to fill with smoke, lowering visibility. 

An interesting thing I found in the Fullerton readings for this week was the concept of both dominant strategies and symmetrical games. I watch a lot of Overwatch League (lol), and the current meta necessitates that both teams play the same team composition in order to have any real chance of winning -- attempts at variation have crashed and burned, and it is therefore both a dominant strategy and a symmetrical game (to a point, the symmetry being map dependent rather than character based). I find this interesting because there are no particular counters and the winner is mostly determined by player skill rather than countering the other teams’ strategy. Unfortunately it’s terminally boring to watch because it’s based almost entirely on teams running at each other with AOE healing and random cross-map headshots. 

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Hop Fella Development/Postmortem

I’ve had some fun working on Hop Fella over the past couple of weeks, but I’ve also run into several problems, development related and not. The first and probably most major is the fact that platformers are not typically text-heavy games. This means that adding the kind of irreverent, ‘it’s a platformer but haha get this it’s kind of silly’ tone was... extremely difficult to implement. The ‘final’ product just feels kind of lifeless. 

I did end up implementing the double ju- er, hop, though, and it works quite well. Combined with the characters’ ability to grab ledges it makes it so the character effectively has a triple jump. Unfortunately this had a flow on effect -- it made actually creating a level that wasn’t too easy or too empty very difficult. The range of movement provided was... simply too much.

 The level layout I went with in the end is designed to be a relatively early-game level; it has varying paths with different levels of difficulty. There is straight up vertically, avoiding the slimes and the crumbling block, and the section on the right, which requires more precise jumps (I removed the bottom platform in the final iteration, meaning that any missed jump ends in death).

More on playtesting in the next post!

Something that I found really interesting in the Fullerton readings for this week was the brief discussion on boundaries, particularly the section on boundaries that askes ‘what if you tried to play a game like football without boundaries’; I think this could be a really interesting thing to explore in a video game, either as its own game or as a mod for an existing game, potentially something like Cyberpunk 2077 (I have no idea if that game is moddable or not but it’s an example). The idea of an open-world (maybe limited somewhat purely for enjoyment’s sake) football game sounds incredibly fun to me; I suppose it’s not dissimilar to a capture the flag mode in a first-person shooter though, really. 

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Getting Started / Elevator Pitch

In beginning work on a platformer prototype I started thinking about what makes a platformer fun. It’s not a genre I play a lot of -- but there are certainly elements of platforming present in a lot of the games that I do play; Terraria for example features a great deal of 2D platforming as you explore the world. While obviously being character dependent, the terrain in Overwatch also requires some degree of skill to navigate. I think the platformer I’ve played the most of in recent years is Spelunky 2, and that features procedurally generated levels -- which is great for endless replayability, but not so great from a level design inspiration perspective due to the random nature of it.  

I think something important that I’ve taken from the Fullarton readings was to make the games that you would actually want to play. To that end, my platformer will take heavy inspiration from Jump King in tone and style (heavy emphasis on vertical jumping rather than a more traditional side-scroller), but be easier to play through. I know some (presumably deeply damaged) people enjoy it, but I find being heavily punished for a mistimed jump and having to backtrack for several minutes particularly unenjoyable. Maybe it’s a skill issue. Hard to say. 

Title: Hop Fella

Pitch: Why would you want to become a jump king? Why can’t you just become a jump... guy? Better yet -- why don’t you just hop. It expends less energy. [citation needed] Just a little hoppy fella. Experience the dizzying heights of vertical traversal and only some of the painful frustration... probably. 

Controls: The arrow keys will move the character to the left and right. Space will hop. Pressing space twice in quick succession? That’s a double hop. Two hops for the price of one (actually the price of two, you have to press the spacebar twice. sorry for lying to you).

Unique selling points:

1. A game that doesn’t take itself too seriously -- you’re just pressing the spacebar and making pixels move for that sweet sweet serotonin. Just hang out. Maybe hop a little. 

2. Potentially the first game to ever implement a double hop (note: I am yet to do this. Probably gonna look at a tutorial after this. It’ll probably be called something like ‘Adding Double Jump to Game in GDevelop’. sue me). 

3. HIDDEN SECRETS! REDACTED

Student Contact Info: n10867970@qut.edu.au