Concept:
People often have a certain impression of certain places from hearing about it on social media, where people tend to only focus on the good and hide the bad. Meet Madison. Madison is a social media influencer who has fallen victim to the glamorized and romanticized New York City. With such ambition to pursue her career in the huge city, Madison impulsively moved to New York because of the beautiful Christmas movie scenes and “just because it’s New York.” Now that she has moved to NYC, she is met with several true NYC obstacles…rats, trash, and crackheads. Help Madison escape from New York by preventing her from crashing into the obstacles!
How it Works:
“Escape From New York” is a relatively easy game to learn how to play. After reading the tutorial, users just have to move their arrow keys left, right, up, or down to help Madison avoid the nasty NYC obstacles. If you run into an obstacle, you lose one of your three lives. If you crash three times, you lose and Madison is stuck in the streets of New York. If you manage to stay alive for 1 minute 30 seconds, you win and have successfully helped Madison get out of New York and back to the suburbs!
Highlights:
Project: Overall, I’m quite proud of this project and how I was able to bring the idea to life in the way I had planned it out to be. The idea for the game was something I found funny to me as a Native New Yorker, who has seen and heard many mixed feelings about NYC. It was nice to create a project on a topic that resonates with me and part of my identity. I’m proud of myself in general for being able to create a literal game with code, two things I thought would be impossible for me to do let alone both at the same time. Even though I got a lot of help from the professor and from other students, I’m still proud of myself for piecing everything together and gaining more experience in this new field.
Code:
// Constrain character's Y position to the range [200, height] charY = constrain(charY, 175, height - charHeight); // Constrain character's X position to the range [0, width] charX = constrain(charX, 0, width - charWidth);
The piece of code that I would like to highlight is this small piece of code that helps constrain Madison to the roads. It really bothered me that she was able to drive up into the buildings and to the sides and hide from the obstacles in frame, so I knew I just had to find a way to constrain her so that it looks more logically correct. Not only would it look right, it would also make it harder for players to cheat and win.
The Piece:
Issues & Improvements:
A lot of the issues I faced were due to some silly mistakes from having a } in the wrong place or having old code that wasn’t cleaned up mixed up with my new code. For example, I was extremely frustrated with my project for a solid hour and a half, trying to figure out why the game and sounds loaded, but nothing happened if I pressed anywhere on the screen. It had to do with a missing } that I put in a random space to get rid of the red error. Instead of seeing where the actual problem came from, I tried taking the easy (but wrong) way out that led to more harm than good. I also had issues with music overlapping, which I later realized because of the professor that I had overlapping codes, hence, overlapping music. I also struggled to come up with a creative way to implement a shape into my project, as all of the visuals come from images. I thought of doing confetti for the winner’s page, but it ended up being too messy and complicating. In the end, I ended up just making two “points” to use some kind of shape to make the colon on the “Tutorial” page. Although I could’ve easily just used an actual colon, I couldn’t think of any other way to incorporate a shape.
Although I’m quite satisfied with the outcome of the project, there are many improvements I wish I had the time to make, and would like to implement into my future projects. For one, the game is 1 minute 30 seconds, but the audio is 1 minute 33 seconds, where the last three seconds are pitch silence. This affected the flow of the suspenseful finale, but I didn’t have time to trim and reupload the audio. Another thing would be to make the canvas bigger and be able to resize with the user’s window size, as well as being able to full screen it. This would really help with the overall game experience by making it feel more engaging and fulfilling. One last improvement would be to stop the ending sounds to loop so frequently, as it gets really repetitive and annoying to hear the same sound on loop after every 4 seconds with no silence in between.