For the midterm project, I decided on making a scuba diving game where the player will be encounter sea treasures and sea monsters in a continuous stream. The player will accumulate points by colliding with gold coins but when a collision is made with a sea monster, the game will end.
The game is in three states: the start, playing and game over states. The start state consist of the game name and instructions printed out on the screen. After the clicking the mouse, you enter a playing state. The task is collect as many coins as possible while avoiding contact with the sea monsters. The game will end when you collide with a sea monster. There are levels in the game which influence the speed at which the sea monsters move. The higher up you go, the faster they move. To move the next level, you must go through a series of 6 backgrounds. You change backgrounds by moving to the right now of the game window.
The diver, monster fishes and coins were implemented with sprites from the internet. The various modes have sounds attached embedded in them. There is also a game play sound the loops when you’re playing the game. The score and the level are displayed at the top left and top right positions.
To make the coins spin, I used a sprite sheet to animate them; displaying one image at a time in a suitable frame count.
Challenges:
Implementing a continuous scrolling background was a big challenge. To resolve that challenge I decided to use a set of related backgrounds and display the continuous when the player reaches the rightmost of the game window. This creates the illusion that he’s move through various scenes underwater.
Integrating the sounds and making them work with the various game modes also required a bit of smart engineering. I decided to use boolean flags that signal when to play and stop a sound.
Embedded Sketch:
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Reflections:
I particularly happy with the current version of the game. I intend to update it further and make the diver be able to fire water shots at the monsters. I tried controlling the diver with hand gestures but the outcome hasn’t really effective, it just wasn’t right for this game. This version of the game doesn’t have a high level of interactivity aside controlling the diver but I think to has the right kind of interactivity that makes the game enjoyable. I plan to explore more ways to make it interactive.