Week 5 – Midterm Progress
Concept:
For my midterm project, I wanted to create a game based on something I love, cats! Growing up and living in Abu Dhabi, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of stray cats, so I wanted to design a game where the player drives around a city, rescues stray cats, and takes them to a shelter. I got inspired by a photography project I did last semester about the spirit of street cats in Abu Dhabi. I went around the city in Abu Dhabi and captured these cats lives and the environment they are in. (link to the photos). The game will combine movement mechanics, object interactions, and a simple pet care system. The goal of the game is to rescue and rehome all the stray cats before the game ends.
User Interaction and Design:
For the interaction, I would like to implement a way for the player to control the car using arrow keys to move around. The stray cats will be at random locations in the city and if the car touches a cat, it is rescued and sent to a shelter. I was also thinking of adding more to the game, where inside the shelter, the player can click on the cat to heal or feed them. Finally, once all the cats are healthy, the game ends and displays a win screen.
→ Visual:
Start Screen: Shows the game instructions and a “start” button.
Game Screen: Has a city background with a moving car, stray cats, and a shelter section.
End Screen: Congratulates the player and has a restart button.
Code Structure:
In order to ensure the code is organized, I plan to use Object-Oriented Programming by creating three main classes.
Car Class:
– Player movement (arrow keys).
– Checks for collisions with pets.
Pet Class:
– Stores pet location and condition (hungry, injured).
– Moves to the shelter when rescued.
Shelter Class:
– Displays rescued pets.
– Tracks pet status and healing progress.
Challenging Part & How I’m Addressing It:
I think that the most frightening part of this project is implementing collision detection between the car and pets. Because the game involves movement, I need to find a way to detect when the car “rescues” a pet. To try to solve this collision detection, I wrote a small sample using dist() function to check if two objects are close enough to interact. This will reduce my risk by confirming that object detection works before I use it in the full game.
function checkCollision(car, pet) {
let d = dist(car.x, car.y, pet.x, pet.y);
return d < 30; // If distance is small, they collide
}