I have been studying Harvard’s CS50’s Introduction to Game Development course on EDX, and as part of this I have to submit a game I’ve created as my final project. This series covers my progress while completing this project.
- Game Dev Blog #0
- Game Dev Blog #1: “Final Project” Approach
- Game Dev Blog #2: “Final Project” Prototyping
- Game Dev Blog #3: Prototyping continued
- Game Dev Blog #4: Clinging on for life
- Game Dev Blog #5: Prototyping almost complete
- Game Dev Blog #6: Prototyping to Production
- Game Dev Blog #7: Animations!
- Game Dev Blog #8: Sound!
- Game Dev Blog #9: More component libraries!
- Game Dev Blog #10: Enemies and backgrounds
- Game Dev Blog #11: The Pareto Principle
- Game Dev Blog #12: Game and course complete!
3 Achievements, 2 Things Learned, 1 Thing Coming Up
Three Achievements
- Found an amazing asset pack for prototyping platform / metroidvania-type games. Which meant I didn’t need to panic trying to make my characters in Aseprite so much. I think the prototype assets will be fine for my course submission, but for the real final game I’d provide these templates to a designer to make the character I want based on those animations.
- Replaced the plain solid colour tiles with image tiles for dirt and rock. I’ve been testing different tile sizes for the game, it’s not fully settled yet, I’ll tweak it based on the player size. I want them to be able to jump onto a block, but two blocks high requires jumping and ledge grabbing.
- Animated player movements! I’ve started looking at the Anim8 library for managing animations, rather than using the Animation class from the previous course projects, however I’ve wrapped this with my own Animation class anyway, which should act as a Fascade pattern in case Anim8 doesn’t really suit my purpose. But it seems okay so far.
Two Things Learned
- More transitional states needed. With the prototype there were no transitional states, e.g. ledge clinging would move straight to the idle state with the player on top of the tile. Once I started adding the animations it soon became obvious I would need transitional player states in between the intial states I had created, so now there’s a “pull up” state that locks the player movement while the animation of pulling themselves up is finished.
- Maybe enemies ARE required after all. I showed the demo to my youngest, who feels that while the game is challenging anyway due to having to find a safe route down, it would be more fun if you had to fight some enemies. The original concept was to focus more on exploring and discovering than fighting, so I don’t want to go overboard, but perhaps some levels will eventually have enemies. So I will add in those mechanics as part of the course submission.
One thing coming up
I’ll be publishing build v0.1.0.8 soon with the animated player movements in place.
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