As I have mentioned in my Midterm Progress Report, my goal was to create not just a game, but rather an interactive environment for which I took inspiration from the game I played a long time ago with my friends.
It was a long journey from the beginning to the end of my work that included not much but, still, some challenging parts that I will describe later in this blogpost.
Concept
Initially, I wanted to create an interactive game related to Christmas Eve, and simply work on good-quality visuals and add certain interactions, e.g. opening the gifts. However, after getting feedback from the professor and thinking about other potential ideas, I realized that it would not be enough for me to be fully satisfied with the results. That is why I decided to add the game that would also include good-quality animations and sprites, and would incorporate the collision detection and OOP principles.
As it needed to also be related to Christmas, I decided to make the Santa the main character of the game. Initially, I wanted to do something with the landscape orientation as my game is pretty wide. However, I decided to reject that idea because of the potential problems with the screen movement control. (For my laptop, for example, as it has a small screen, the game exceeds the boundaries of the monitor, so I need to scroll through the screen).
I decided to implement the game with the basic concept of ‘something falling from the sky, and you either need to dodge it or catch it’. Nothing special, but I strived to make it as fun as possible. In my game, the background poster inside the house tells that there is a shortage of gifts. The goal of the user is to help Santa to catch the gifts while dodging the icicles falling from the sky. The user can control the character by using the arrow keys.
Talking about the broader picture outside of the mini-game that I just described, my game consists of two main stages, outside the house (serves mainly aesthetic purposes with very nice background music that I received multiple compliments about haha), and inside the house (platform for interactions and ‘entrance’ to the mini-game).
PLAY THE GAME IN THE FULLSCREEN (PRESS ‘F’ FOR THE FULL FULLSCREEN)
Problems and Solutions
Although there were not too many problems, there were enough difficulties and struggles that it will not be possible to fit here, so I will focus mainly on those that I’m actually proud of resolving.
1) By my mistake, the biggest struggle was to connect the games together. Yes, you read it right. Connect the games.
For some reason, I was naive enough to think that p5.js has a function that can magically embed one sketch into another. Don’t get me wrong, p5.js is an amazing platform with many functionality and features to offer, but I expected such a concept of unification to exist. Exactly why, I decided, to make things easier and write the code for my mini-game in the separate file. It was to my big surprise to realize, after an hour of trying, that it is impossible to just straight up integrate the mini-game into my main file. So I needed to put a lot of work and precision into the transfer of the code, and, at some points, to hardcode, to plug the mini-game into the screen of the main game as you can see playing it now.
} else if (currentScene === 4) {
// Game scene
playGameSceneMusic();
image(blurred_house_interior, 0, 0, 1800, 900);
fill(0, 147, 255);
rect((width - sceneGameWidth) / 2, (height - sceneGameHeight) / 2, sceneGameWidth, sceneGameHeight);
isMouseOnArrow = checkIfMouseOnArrow();
drawArrow(); // to be able to exit back to scene 2
if (!gameStarted) {
displayRulesScreen(); // rules
} else if (gameOver) {
displayGameOverScreen(); //game over
} else if (gameWon) {
displayWinScreen(); // win
} else {
playGame(); // game state
2) Music and Sound effects were not behaving as intended. The main problem was the repetitiveness and infinite looping of the sounds during the interactions with the object. For example, a knock on the door would repeat itself from the start to the finish all the time while the mouse is pointing at it. I needed to fix it using the limiting boolean conditions (true/false). I hope you get what I mean by this. If you don’t, perhaps it will be easier when you’ll look into the code.
if (mouseX > doorX && mouseX < doorX + doorWidth && mouseY > doorY && mouseY < doorY + doorHeight) {
doorTrigger = true;
if (doorKnockCharged === true) { // to play sound once per mouse pointing
doorKnock.play();
doorKnockCharged = false;
}
} else {
doorTrigger = false;
doorKnockCharged = true;
}
3) Screen scrolling with the arrow keys did not allow to make the experience of playing the mini-game enjoyable. The Santa movements are bonded to the Left Arrow and Right Arrow. At the same time, as I have mentioned above, my screen, as I expect to be for most users as well, was too short, so the picture of the game is scrollable in the fullscreen mode. In p5.js, arrow keys trigger the screen scrolling, which interrupted the mini-game flow as the screen waas constantly moving left and right with the key clicks. I even posted the question in the discord channel, but after the internet research I found the solution.
// blocking arrow key default behavior using window event listener
window.addEventListener("keydown", function(event) {
if (event.key === "ArrowUp" || event.key === "ArrowDown" || event.key === "ArrowLeft" || event.key === "ArrowRight") {
event.preventDefault(); // Prevent default scrolling behavior
}
});
4) When opening the gifts and the mini-game, I needed to come up with the background to be used. As looking for new backgrounds would take too much time, I decided to make it in a similar way many games do – blur the background to make the effect of focus on the chosen item. Initially, I tried to implement it using the filter(BLUR, ...) function in p5.js. Although the effect looked nice, for some reason, my game started lagging and freezing during the scenes with using the blur (probably has something to do with the constant update of pixels on the screen). So I decided to make a little smart move – instead of blurring the picture inside the game, I blurred the picture using the blurring tool on the internet and simply plugged it into my sketch.
PLAY THE GAME IN THE FULLSCREEN (PRESS ‘F’ FOR THE FULL FULLSCREEN)
Conclusion
I am very proud of my work on this midterm project. I accomplished more than I initially planned to, and I managed to maintain a more or less high standard of gaming. I found good quality images, sounds, and sprites, I successfully handled the unexpected difficulties, and managed to build the game without significant bugs (hopefully there are no bugs at all haha). Most importantly, I achieved my initial goal of creating an art piece of nostalgia for myself, and I did it by putting in a lot of hard work and thinking processes. Of course, there are a lot of things that I could add to the game or implement in a better way, for example using less hardcoding and following a more logical and organized approach. I could make more high-level effects or create better-quality textures, etc.. Unfortunately, it was not enough time to accomplish all that I could.
Nevertheless, I am happy with how the course is going so far. I have a lot to learn and grasp, and it keeps me excited and motivated for the second half of the course. Looking forward to working with Arduino!