For my midterm project, I decided to make a little balloon-saving game. The basic idea is simple: the balloon flies up to the sky and faces obstacles on its way, that the player needs to avoid
Concept & Production
Instead of just popping balloons, I wanted to make the balloon itself the main character. The player controls it as it floats upward, while obstacles move across the screen. The main production steps I’ve worked on so far include:
- Making the balloon move upwards continuously.
- Adding obstacles that shift across the screen.
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Writing collision detection so that the balloon “fails” if it hits something.
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Bringing back the buttons and menu look from the beginning, so the game starts cleanly.
It’s been fun turning the balloon from a simple object into something the player actually interacts with.
The Most Difficult Part
By far, the trickiest part has been the balloon popping without errors. Sometimes, the collisions were detected when they shouldn’t be, which gave me a bunch of false pops. Fixing that took way more trial and error than I expected, but I think I finally have it working in a way that feels consistent (I used help from AI and YouTube).
Risks / Issues
The main risk right now is that the game sometimes lags. Most of the time, it works fine, but once in a while, the balloon pops out of nowhere in the very beginning. I’m not sure if it’s about how I’m handling the objects or just the browser being picky. I’ll need to look into optimizing things as I add more features.
Next Steps
From here, I want to polish the interactions more, add sound effects, and make sure the game is fun to play for longer than a few seconds and looks visually appealing and more aesthetic. But overall, I feel good that the “scariest” part (getting rid of the balloon popping errors) is mostly handled.