P1 - Games Proposal - Week 4 & Submission

Games Proposal - Project 1

 

Week 4 (11/10) & Submission (18/10)

For this project, I decided to take what I was doing for my honours project and make the game playable which is a 2D Platform game inspired by Super Mario World and Donkey Kong.

Koya’s Adventure: The Lost Curse

The game tells the story of Koya being cursed after eating a mysterious fruit he found which turned him into an animal. In this adventure, Koya will have to find a solution to break the curse from the mysterious fruit so he can go back to being a human.

There he meets a wizard frog named Shin. Knowing what happened to Koya, Shin offers his help to break the curse from the mysterious fruit, but only if Koya collects all 10 different types of flowers which will help Shin make the potion to turn Koya back into a human.

In the first level, there are 7 Cherry Blossoms to be collected.

The player can also collect coins, once you collect 100 you gain an extra life. In future levels, the coins can also be used to buy items/power-ups. There are 30 coins spread across the first level.

Objective: First you speak to Shin, then you have to explore the map to find all Cherry Blossoms. Once you collect them all, the gate will open giving you access to the next area which is the Crystal Cave.

This is what the first level looked like when I started developing it.

Full Blockout of the Game done in UE5

Youtube Video of the Blockout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY_HmKt0BvI

The gameplay of the level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-wA6HjkgPc

Since I already had half of the project nearly done, on week 3 and 4 I finished blocking it out, adding all the blueprints I needed to get the level going and adding a game menu with an exit, play and control button. 

The blueprints I've added and the problems I've encountered:

●     Character Animation – I tried animating my own sprites, but I didn’t have enough time to get everything completed, so I decided to use an asset pack with a 2D Sprite.

●     Character BPs – With the help of YouTube videos I got a lot of my character’s BPs done, the only one I could not get to work was the climbing system.

●     Climbing BP – My biggest problem was getting my character to climb stairs. I’ve watched many videos and I couldn’t get my character to climb, so I had to use the respawning system and some platforms to complete the level.

●     Teleport/Respawning BP – I’ve used the teleport system before in some of my previous projects, so I didn’t have a problem getting that done, but since I was having trouble getting the respawning system working properly, I decided to use the teleport BP to get the player back to a certain part of the level depending where you died.

●     Game Menu: The last problem I encountered was getting my menu to work properly. I tried to keep it simple and only add a Start button, a controls button and an exit button. I managed to get the controls and exit buttons working fine, but for some reason, whenever I packaged my project and tried to play it by pressing the start button the main menu would not disappear but you could see the game running in the background. I tried watching different video tutorials on Youtube when creating a menu to see if I did something wrong, but all of them were following pretty much the same step and it was working fine both inside UE5 and after packaging it, but my menu was only working properly inside UE5 when I would try the game out.

Main Menu

Controls' Menu

The sprite and some of the assets like the trees, the grass and the spikes are from ‘Sunnyland Asset Pack’ which I downloaded for free from Itch.io: https://ansimuz.itch.io/sunny-land-pixel-game-art

 

 

P1 - Games Proposal - Week 3 & 4

 

Games Proposal - Project 1

Week 3 (04/10) & Week 4 (11/10)

Developing my Idea / Tutor Advice / Changing Idea

After pitching my idea to my tutors and getting their feedback I tried expanding my ideas more to make the game more unique, for example, my tutors weren’t sure about what was unique about my character for the first level and if I was going to be using him for the other levels too, so I decided to have different characters for each level.

Developing my Idea

Idea for Level 1

Theme & Boss - The level would be in the forest and the main boss for it would be a big spider who would be shooting webs to trap the player. To get the web off the player you’d need to wiggle the mouse. During the boss fight, there will be mini spiders coming out of the tree to attack the player.

Main Character – The character for level 1 would be Blue and his special ability is Heavy Weight which destroys enemies with one jump, Blue would need to collect umbrellas to help him control the fall. Since he’s heavy, he will fall quicker than the other characters and won’t move from side to side as fast.

Minions - For the small minions I would have things like small puffy spiders, flies and sticky slim so it matches the theme for the level.

Idea for Level 2

Theme & Boss - The level would be in a Japanese Haunted Dojo and the main boss for it would be a Demon Oni Mask who would be using a fire jutsu to hit the player. From time to time the boss would go invisible, so the player would need to dodge the fireballs and watch out for the small enemies until there was an opportunity to attack the boss again.

Main Character – The main character for level 2 would be Shiro and his special ability is dexterity &  and he can slow time down. Shiro is a ninja so he is faster than Blue and he will be able to slow time down with the kame jutsu power-up that will be spawning randomly like the other power-ups through the level.

Minions - Enemies: For the small minions I would have small puffy spiders, ghosts, and bats and throughout the level before the boss fight, the Oni Demon would be hitting the screen with his hands so the player would need to dodge that.

Tutor Advice

After having a chat and getting feedback from my tutors I’ve realised that the project I was going to do wasn’t really showing off my level design skills which had me questioning if that was really something I wanted to spend time on if I couldn’t use it on my portfolio if executed correctly.

Because of that, I decided to change my game idea and make something more simple, but more interesting.

It was a risk since I didn’t have as much time as I would if I had this idea from the beginning, but I am happier with the new project and different from the first one I am showing my level design a lot more.

P1 - Games Proposal - Week 1 & 2

Games Proposal - Project 1

Week 1 (20/09) - Game Idea / Preparing for Pitch Presentation

In the first week, we had to pick which type of project we wanted to do, so I chose ‘One-Input’ and the first few ideas I had was to make something similar to Geometry Dash, Surviving High School, Mega Jump, Cut The Rope or Where’s My Water? since I played those titles quite a lot on my iPhone.

After watching some gameplay for some of them I decided to make something similar to Mega Jump. The game has been discontinued from both Apple Store and Google Play, so people aren’t able to play it anymore.

Mega Jump was released in 2010 and with it being quite popular when it came out, they decided to release its second version ‘Mega Jump 2’ which was released in 2013. The game stopped getting updates in 2015, so users aren’t able to download it anymore which is why I wanted to make something similar to it, but add a twist to it like boss fights at the end of each level. 

Week 2 (27/09) - Pitch Presentation

In week two I had to put together a pitch PowerPoint presentation for my tutors about which category I was going to do from the brief which I chose ‘One-Input’ and what type of game I was making.

Below are screenshots of some of the slides from my PowerPoint explaining my game idea, which references I have used and how the first level would be.

'' In this game, the player will use the mouse to go left or right. The objective is for the player to keep collecting coins, and jumping on enemies or obstacles to keep going up. If the player misses any of those it will be game over.''