Thinking about my midterm idea last weekend, I realized that I wanted to create something that was related to Christmas. Being far away from home, I often think about my childhood and those cozy winter holidays that I used to spend with my family and friends, so my midterm is a representation of one of my favorite times of the year.
When deciding on the style of my project, at first I wanted to create some sort of game. However, I decided to try something new – different from the typical collision-detection or platform games that I did all the way through my Introduction to Computer Science class. I decided for it to be an interactive game that would incorporate different elements of my memories about Christmas – music, visual elements, and the overall atmosphere of the celebration because it would be both a pleasant experience for me and something more unusual. As I found out later during the week, when the professor was showing us the previous midterms, my idea about the interactive game was not so unique. The Cafe game is a great example of such, and in some way, I got some additional inspiration by looking at it, but, of course, I will do my best to make my game even better.
Designing the Idea
As I did not have much time this week, my goal was to simply outline the idea and start working on the basic fundamentals of my game. First of all, the opening screen will be full of Christmas celebration elements. One of the first concerns that I faced was to find good high-quality textures for my game, because usually, the free game images I see on the internet are not that good-looking, and for the good ones you need to pay. However, after I spent some time looking for a free PNG no-background images website, I came across a couple where I found exactly what I needed for my game. This is one of the good websites I used – CleanPNG. I also decided to add the possibility of entering the fullscreen – when you press ‘f’ inside the p5.js editor. I remember the technique the professor showed us to make the canvas and all the elements automatically adjusted based on the size of the window, so I even tried to implement it using windowResized() function, but I decided that it would add unnecessary complications further in the game in case I needed to hardcode something, so I abandoned the idea and decided to stick to the size of the canvas 1800×900.
The second stage of my game will take place inside the house. Once the user clicks the door, the inner side of the house will appear on the screen. I took some inspiration from the game called ‘Fortnite’ which I used to play in my middle school years. It had a very nice Christmas event called Winterfest, and that is what it looked like:
The idea was that you log in to the game every day and you can open one gift per day. It had some in-game outfits, weapon skins, and other customizable items, but the main reason I still remember this game is the memories of how I used to play it with my friends during the school winter break.
For my midterm project, I want to implement the idea of opening gifts. I think that it will be the biggest challenge – to think of how the animation of opening the gifts will work and what I want to put inside. I really want to make it a good-quality interaction, so I will do my best to find all the necessary resources to learn the code elements I need to implement for that. As of now, I have not chosen any specific solution, but I am sure I will use a lot of OOP in my code, as well as a lot of functions. In fact, I already started creating functions for each of the elements that are shown on the screen because I can potentially add some animations or sounds for them next week.
Conclusion
So far I really like how I am working on developing my idea. I really want to use my imagination and try to create something that I would be proud of. As I have mentioned before, this game is a good representation of my memories, and I will try to make the most out of my time to make it great.