- Describe the overall concept of your project (1-2 paragraphs)
For the midterm project, I’m continuing to develop the “SURVIVE” game I created in week 3. The game concept is based on many retro games such as space invaders. The goal of this interactive video game is to avoid oncoming RGB-colored missiles while the user controls a triangle at the cursor. The objective of the game’s endless mode is to live for as long as you can and obtain high scores. To go with the retro theme, I made the main menu also styled like an arcade game. The sound effects I chose were also intended to give off a retro vibe. The soundtrack is energetic and upbeat which matches the type of feel I wanted the gameplay to have.
- Describe how your project works and what parts you’re proud of (e.g. good technical decisions, good game design) 2-3 paragraphs
The projectiles are all separate objects that have collision detection with the player. The timer counts up and the bullets’ speed increases the more time passes. To make the game easier to browse, I also incorporated a variety of menus. There is a main menu and a game-over menu included. I also added a Highscores menu that keeps track of the player’s scores locally (in the browser) and sorts them from highest to lowest. The gameplay has been enhanced by adding 3 new mechanics. Shield and Slowdown which are powerups and Clear which is an active ability. Picking up Shield allows the player to be able to take collide with an incoming projectile without losing any HP. Slowdown, when picked up makes the projectiles move in slow-motion for a short duration. Clear can be activated by pressing space or mouseclick, and it emits a blue circle around the player which neutralizes all incoming projectiles that collide within the circle.
Finding the right balance with regard to the power-up spawn frequency and clear cooldown is something that I found to be very interesting. For the game to have the right amount of challenge while not making it too easy is surprisingly a hard balance to find. This naturally took a lot of trial and error to find a frequency that forced the player to actually play the game and avoid the obstacles while also keeping them frequent enough to where the player gets to use the power-ups multiple times a playthrough. With Clear being an active ability the player can trigger it was vital to not make the cooldown time too short as it would make the game too easy, I settled on around 20 seconds. This amount of time makes the player heavily consider the opportunity cost of using the ability which makes the game more engaging.
I am also proud of how I structured the program to handle multiple menus. How organized or disorganized the code depends on the structure used. Each menu will be in its own if statement that tests the current “level,” as I chose to do. Currently, there are 4 different levels. These are the main menu, game over screen, high scores, and the actual game. The application can only retrieve information that is made available to the current level variable using this structure. As a result, developing game features is considerably simpler and easier. It also makes it so that the program does not have to go through every line of code as it is restricted to levels, this reduces the amount of processing power required.
- Describe any problems you ran into (1-2 paragraphs)
I ran into problems with the Highscores function of the game. Initially I thought that it would be possible to write directly to an uploaded txt file in p5js. When I was researching online I saw that most people were using savestring() to do this. However, when I tried it, the file would just download onto my browser but not change the already uploaded txt file which I was reading from. I had tried a few more functions but to no success. So I opted for a local storage solution that used storeitem() and getitem(). These functions would store all the data locally on your browser and would stay after multiple sketch resets. The main drawback with this approach is that it is locally stored, meaning that players on other computers would not see the same high scores.
I also ran into a weird bug that I couldn’t figure out for a good while. When I was clicking on the return to main menu button it would take me to the high scores menu. This weird behavior did not make any sense when I looked at the code itself. But upon further investigation, I realized the problem stemmed from the mouseIsClicked variable I was using to interact with the buttons. The issue was that it would stay returning true as long as I held the mouse button down and I was within the range of the button. In addition to this, my return to the main menu button was in the exact same position as the high scores button in the main menu. So in reality the program was actually switching to the main menu, but in the split second in which I was holding down the mouse button, it would also activate the high score menu. I solved this problem but introducing a clicked boolean value and using the mouseClicked() function. This made it so that only one instance of true would be returned when I clicked on the mouse button.