Concept:
For my midterm project, I was inspired by some of the mini-games in Five Nights at Freddys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB8iVkfWlBU.
Especially the balloon-boy mini-game or Chica mini-game where essentially as the main character, you’re in a platform style game and you’re supposed to go around collecting balloons to give to the children throughout the game. I found it a pretty simple concept but very fun to play around with:
I obviously wanted my own design of the game but I had trouble thinking of what to do. But, I was watching one of my favourite animes One Piece and I thought why not just make a game about that! It’s a pretty cool idea and it’s pretty motivational for me so I went along with it!
My Game Idea:
The game idea is pretty cool. Essentially the main character of the series is a guy called Luffy, and he is known for always being hungry and eating everything he can possibly find. So, I decided to make a similar platform style game where Luffy would jump around eating as much food as possible.
To make it into a game, I thought of implementing a depleting hunger bar, and the goal is to keep feeding Luffy by jumping around and eating food before that hunger bar runs out and the only way to refill that hunger bar is to eat food. If you manage to satisfy Luffy’s hunger bar before time runs out, you win! Else you lose!
Progress:
With regards to my process, i’ve so far, made the main menu screen. This main menu screen has some music playing in the background, I added a slider so the user can control the volume. I added an instructions tab so the user knows how to play. I also added a difficulty system, where the user can select between Easy, Medium and Hard mode. The idea is, the greater the difficulty, the faster Luffy’s Hunger bar depletes, hence the more challenging it gets to satisfy Luffy’s hunger.
I’ve also set the stage for the platforms of the game and i’ve added an animation for the hunger bar depletion when the game starts. If the hunger bar reaches 0, for now it just says “Game Over”:
Game:
Things still left to do:
- I have to create the food items and their specific data (this includes their spawn point, spawn rate and food value)
- I have to animate Luffy’s movements (using a sprite sheet i’ve found on the internet)
- I have to work on collision detection with Luffy and the Food objects and the Platform objects.
- I have to ensure that when a collision is detected between Luffy and Food, it should refill the Hunger Bar
- Add a time countdown
- Create an ending screen (depending on whether the user wins/loses)
- Allow the user to restart or go back to the Main Menu.
Terrifying parts of the code:
In my opinion, I think the most terrifying bit is going to be two things, animating Luffy’s movements, being both left and right and especially the jumping animation. The issue with this is, if you press both the LEFT and UP arrow keys together, they don’t move the object diagonally because it registers as one key pressed at a time, so to handle smooth movement is going to be tricky. I’m thinking to avoid this I might have to ensure the platforms are close enough for the user to maneuver across the game.
Also animating Luffy’s jump is going to be extremely tricky. For this, I am thinking of creating a sort of gravity variable, which will allow Luffy to move up a maximum distance when pressed the UP Arrow key and then after that, he would move down in the opposite direction. Still need to do some thinking for that.
Finally, another tricky thing would be collision detection. I’m wondering how to ensure that Luffy can stand on the platforms. For now, i’ve set up a class for Platforms and a class for Luffy and if their x and y coordinates are the same, then Luffy can stand on the platforms. Still need to do some more thinking of that.
Overall:
Overall, I feel like this can be a really cool game. The easy bit is kinda done but the challenging bits are here and I’ll work hard to ensure the game is great!