For this week, I have not been doing very much different from last week. Overall, this past week has been very unproductive for me due to the fact that there are very few things I can do otherwise to add to a game than what I already have (with the current understanding about making games). Coming up with elements to add to my game to make it more interesting or harder has been really challenging and for pretty much the whole week I was tossing around ideas, realizing I don’t know how to make them work properly, then scraping them. I haven’t really come up with a solution to this problem other than finding an idea that I can use. One thing I learned from this experience is that I know very little about how to make a game other than making the basic structure for a game. I don’t know how to make very much else than movement and simple controls or control variables. I am a total Game Maker noob!
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For a good while, we have been working in game maker. This week, we are starting on a project to improve one of the pre-existing games that we have made. One thing that we were supposed to improve upon was the game progression and interest. We were to implement certain features into our game, using the knowledge that we already had about making games, to make the game more interesting. As the games were, they did not have enough in them to make them interesting; they lacked a good sense of difficulty. The games had a good and basic set of game mechanics, but their difficulty ranged from a few asteroid (in the game Galactic mail) to a couple more asteroids and a few more moons. The problem was that they were too basic. after a while, the player would get tired of the game because it lacked a sense of achievement or progression. For this project, I chose to improve the Lazarus game, as it seemed to be the easiest to work with. One thing that needed major improvement was the level system. The levels ranged from a single block obstacle at the start, to three boxes and a harder-to-reach button. For this, I added more levels with different types of obstacles. First, I changed the walls so that the player had a smaller space to move around in, then I made it so the player could block the button if they were not careful about where they stood, and finally, I make it so the player could get trapped under a wall. Another thing I have been trying out is a type of box that is indestructible from the other boxes, but also light enough that it wouldn't crush any other box. This feature would help a player set a stack of boxes so they aren't super frustrated when their stack of boxes is crushed by that one stone box. This would help the game progression by both speeding things up as time goes on as well as balance difficulty and playability. When considering the general game progression of this game, I feel that what I have done doesn't really help the actual progression, but it does acknowledge the players own desires and expectations for the game.
This week we have been working hard in game maker to build a video game. We were given tutorials for each of these games to follow in order to make these games correctly. The first assigned game was called Evil Clutches and the goal was for the mother dragon (the player) to collect her babies as well as avoid or kill the demons that were coming after her. The player had the ability to move the dragon up or down as well as shoot fireballs at the incoming enemies to earn points. The goal of the game was to collect the most points. Overall, making the game was quite simple as the tutorial for the game was very detailed. I was able to finish this game very quickly, which put me ahead of the rest of my class. One mistake, however, is that I neglected to follow the "finishing touches" part of the tutorial as carefully, and missed a somewhat large part of the game information. The second game we "made" was a game called Galactic Mail. The objective of this game was to deliver all the mail to each moon colony without being struck by the passing asteroids, which would destroy the player's starship. Like the previous project, I was able to finish this in a short amount of time with little to no problems with the game, putting me further ahead in the class. One problem I did encounter during this was the ship controls not being as smooth as they should have been, causing the player to be unable to move the ship properly. When going back into the ship controls, I found that I had not enables the 'relative' option for the movement key. I learned that the between relative and nonrelative will effect your game in a huge way, making the game either move with fluidity, or in short bursts depending on the action the player is performing. The last game I made was a game called Lazarus. The objective of this game was for the player to avoid the stacking boxes while trying to reach the button to get to the next level. Although this game was much longer and more complicated than the other games, I had no trouble while making the game. In this game, we were told to make a cheat button to allow the player to skip levels (strictly used for grading purposes). After finishing this game, I had a lot of extra time to help my peers with their games. I realized while helping others that one simple mistake as forgetting to enable something or not can determine if your game is playable or not. Game maker is a really useful tool for learning to make games because it tells you about the mistake you made. If we were using real game making engines, I feel that a lot of people in my class would have a lot of troubles making the games because they would forget about those little things and not be able to tell what is wrong. One example of this is from the peer I helped the most with my extra time; she was having a lot of troubles with her falling boxes in the Lazarus game and she couldn't figure out why. I explained to her that she needed to have a collision event with every box in every falling box object. Since she didn't have these collisions, her game would crash when one box came in contact with another box without a collision event. These projects from the past week have taught me a lot about how games are made and how they function. When I apply this game knowledge to the video games I am currently playing, I can understand basically what the game developer did at each turn to make the game function. It is really interesting to see. |
AuthorMy name is Anna Marshall, nice to meet you! check out the 'about me' page for more information about me! Archives
May 2018
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