Idea
For my midterm, I decided to create a game based on old flash games: simple premises with a hint of an 8 bit aesthetic. The game Lift involves the player spamming their space bar to lift the barbell. The user can choose their difficulty in the form of the weight, and is given 10 seconds to complete the game, or else they lose. To give the user some feedback, I added a progress bar on the left of the screen and a progressing image of a person lifting the barbell.
Implementation
I first created a class that represented the game, featuring a weight and a set of reusable buttons that started or increased/decreased the game difficulty. I reflected the game difficulty with a changing color for the text and the start and restart had moving text that oscillated to draw the players attention.
As the user plays the game, the image and flame behind the image would progress to indicate how close the user is to completing the game. A sound would play to give a sense of feedback to the user. I also increased the size and redness of the time left text to create a sense of urgency for the player. The image used is a trace of myself, but shaded black to look less awkward.
I controlled the mouse clicks and button presses by game screen state in order to ensure nothing outside the screen was being modified. The shaking and game end time were calculated by taking the current time and adding them to a variable, and I used perlin noise for the duration after a user pressed the space bar to shake the images and display the fire.
Reflection
I enjoyed making this game as I think I was able to make it function consistently with a set style. I think there is some tweaking necessary in terms of difficulty as weights over 300kg feel practically impossible, but someone with fast fingers could prove me wrong. I would also like to see a leaderboard functionality, but outside of the local scope that would require some type of file manipulation or connection to an external database.