Benny The Fish 🐳

Final Product 💥

Concept 📌

As explained during my first blog entry, I wanted to turn Benny the Fish, my CommLab comic into a game. The art style, design and plot of the comic would be reflected in my creative process for the game. In its current and final form, the game goes like this:

1. 1. 1. The players begin in an introductory screen where they see the logo, the playable character, and a short set of instructions. They begin to play by pressing any of the keyboard arrow keys.
      2. Then, they will be able to move the character around in a setting that resembles a fishbowl. As the first level of this game, the background parallels the initial fishbowl where Benny is. In this case, however, Benny has to evade water bottles and eat food.
         1. – Every piece of food eaten increases the player’s score. Every 5, the size of Benny increases by 10%, making the game harder.
         2. -If the player touches a bottle, they will be taken to a screen reiterating it is bad for Benny to touch plastic. Then, with arrow keys, players can continue exactly where they left off. Bottles around the fish are moved back as to not cause problems.  Every time this happens lives (initially 3) decrease by 1.
      3. If the player runs out of lives, they are taken to a game over screen indicating Benny’s death and prompting the user to restart the game.
      4. After 25 pieces of food, the player is taken t o level two. Benny grows into a whale (Plot Twist) and there is a new enemy in sight. The rest of the mechanics are the same.
      5. Upon  reaching a score of 50, the user is taken to a winning screen. Benny can’t stop growing and, thus, they are prompted to click anywhere to restart the game.

Materials 🔎

• • The idea for the comic and characters was  in collaboration  Jeongin Lee, Chaehyun Ha and Mike Kattan.
  • All of the objects were designed by me in Adobe Illustrator, and the backgrounds & logos in Procreate.
  • The sounds were taken from  https://freesound.org/

Reflection 👨🏼‍💻

Working on Benny was a big challenge for me. It was a great exercise to make sure I was proficient in all of the concepts covered in class, and made me grow a lot as a coder. I learned that there is not always one way to solve a problem. Creativity, resilience and patience are necessary to make sure you can execute your vision. Having started which such a defined and specific vision for my game made it so that I had to adapt the code to my preferences. Not the other way around. For this, I am very proud. Albeit Failing to do the sprite sheet for Benny, I managed to include all of the other elements and mechanics that I wanted to, ending with what I believe to be a very successful game. Me and my roomates have played the game a few times and can vouch for it having a logical flow and technical stability. I am very proud of the final result. I hope you enjoy meeting Benny the Whale.

Journey 🛬

Given the fragility of my computer and previous experiences, I saved multiple backups of the game throughout my process. These are shown in all of my updates, and display my progress through time. Here are the updates in my project since March 2nd. (See previous post for updates 1, 2, villains)

Update 3: Conditionals & Design (March 3rd – 6th) 🏞

This might be one of the, if not the biggest update for Benny the Fish. After integrating the villains & controls during Wednesday’s class I spent a lot of time with the conditionals. During the initial days of this weekend, I wrote in my code a switch statement that would create the modes of (1) intro screen, (2) gameplay, (3) losing screen, (4) winning screen. This allowed me to have a much more structured product. I also added if statements to build the killing of Benny mechanism, while adding a live count.  I also added images as backgrounds which make the experience of playing much better. Currently, the game has many elements to be fixed, bugs and improvements, but as soon as I add the designs for the villains and figure out how to restart the bottles.push() & canPlastic.push() for loops, the game will be a playable and great initial product. I still have a lot of work ahead, but believe the game looks very promising.

As always, my immediate next steps are:

1. 1. Designing the villains & adding them into the game.
   2. With the villains’ design, I can make sure that the distance interactions are as accurate as possible to give the game a better feel. (Not looking forward for this step)
   3. Add Background music, bumping, dying, & eating sounds.

Some overall steps I want to take are:

1. 1. Figure out how to win. Time? Eating Mechanism?
   2. Adding different levels. I would love for Benny to grow & change of scenery as he does in the comic.
   3. Adding the tail animation for swimming.

Update 4: Error Fixing (March 6th) ⚓️

When hit by a villain, I would press any arrow key to continue playing, but would often find myself amongst a group of villains, making it impossible to continue the game. Thus, I spent a lot of time trying to reset the for loop that moved the villains. Nevertheless, I was able to more easily fix this situation by adding a conditional statement within the function  moveVillain() to reset the positions of the villains surrounding the starting area of Benny. Finally I managed to have the dynamic be: if Benny is killed, he stays in the place he died, where the player can continue. However, all villains in a 200 px would move to y=0.

I also added a little element so that you can see the silhouette of Benny when killed, and organized some of the code.

Update 5: Food, Water Bottles & Lives Counter (March 7th) ❤️❤️❌

An important element I wanted to include in my game was a way to win. In the comic, Benny ends up in the ocean and growing. I needed to include this in the game. Thus, I added a food mechanism that allows the fish to eat, and increase the player’s score.

I also designed a temporary image for the villain water bottles. I switched the circle for a rectangle and spent an embarrassing amount of time playing with the distance function to make sure the dynamics feel natural but are a little forgiving.

My next steps after this update would be to:

1. 1. Add a growing Mechanism
   2. Add a second level & winning screen
   3. Add sounds to the game

Update 6: Level 2 & Winning Screen (March 8th) 🪜

This is probably the update that took the longest to make. I wanted update 6, the last update before the final entry to be a submittable project. That is, a sketch that would fulfill all the requirements for this midterm assignments. I added a second level with the whale sprite as I wanted to be a little more faithful to the comic, and I added a winning screen. This allowed Benny the Fish to be a much more complete experience. Furthermore, I added upbeat music for the background of the game to simulate previous experiences I’ve had with games.