Rush Hours
Abstract
Game Mechanics: Direction Keys to control player car left move right, right move right, and up is a jump. "R" key is restart. Clicking left mouse button to navigate on the menu. Items: Red Heart for HP up, Star for invisible. Resource: Survive Time and Score. You as the player car need to avoid the traffic blue car to collect Star. Touching blue cars will damage you 1 heart. After you get the start, you will have 5 second invisible time to kill blue car for scores. Gameplay Genre: 2-D platform Game. Theme: Make the traffic. You hate traffic and want to destroy all the cars. Literary Genre: Destruction makes people happy! Goal: Let people gain excitement when they can destroy cars and gain as many points as possible. When we start to create this graphical game, I started with the theme in mind. How traffic in the real world can relate with gameplay and let the player enjoy? I start to think about why people hate traffic. People hate traffic because they can’t move and must be stuck inside the line. To provide people solution to release their pressure in the real world, I create my gameplay mechanism which player as an angry driver can destroy cars in front of their car. However, an invincible car won’t provide the gamer any challenge when playing the game. I need to make the game harder which player car can’t destroy other enemy cars until they collect the invincible star item. I also add more enemy types, like enemy car and enemy bus, to the world, and the linear world map which player car need some time to drive to the end. The enemies and items will randomly spawn through the world which player will discover different each time they play the game. In the end, I made the game world into an infinite loop which player can continue playing the game until they die. All these add up to the gameplay, which makes gameplay more diverse and longer. The aesthetic goal of this game is to provide people fun about the concept without thinking about the real world. We adapt 2d art which makes this game more accessible to people of all age because we don’t want people to start playing our game and felt bad about those cars they destroyed. At the same time, the art needs to be recognized as car, road, sky or building. I learned a lot from this class about the concept and theories of game design, and I also tried to utilize some of them inside this game. For example, we tunning the control of the player car a lot to make it feel good to play. I learned that like the star war game inside the lecture, the player control needs to be good enough so that people wouldn’t frustrate about the game control and lose connection with the in-game character. Besides, to add up the player connected to the player car, I add three lines of back story at the start of the game. These three lines of text send the message to the player that the player car is the angry driver to control. This class also teach us to be a great playtester. When we think we have finished the game, we will playtest the game again and again. We always found some bugs here and there which hard to find if you don’t play the game. Last but not least, this class teach me about the resource and loop player can get. We create Heart and Invicinble star as in-game items for the player car to live longer and destroy more car. When you destroy the enemy car, you also will get scores to add on to the center of the screen. All these looping systems from HP and Stars into scores and survive time give players a goal to achieve in this game. Different than other platformer game, like Mario, our game only has one platform. In this platform, the player needs shifts between surviving and attacking stages constantly. Player need to survive in the rush of cars until they find the invincible star to attack back. Other than games like Mario, our game didn’t have a goal to reach in the end. The game provides and constant changing loop which player needs to survive as long as possible. This combination of gameplay mechanism is novel which I don’t see in other games. According to many playtesting from different people, we correct our game a lot. From the alpha playtest, our peer played the game and think the control is lacking, which the player car can’t jump high enough and the car shift too much when turning. To fix the first problem, we tunning control by changing the jump strength and gravity. This makes the control felt more smooth and responsive. For the second one, we change the center of the turning to the player car sprit. Now, when the player turns left or right, the player car will shift at the same place. Form TA’s grading comments which the background is too bright to distinguish the items from it. We change the whole background into lighter and darker than before. Then we bring up the items sprits contrast and brightness to the max. This makes the items pop out from the background which let player more easy to see. From our own playtest, we discover lots of problems when we playing the game instead of looking at the code itself. For example, survive time won’t stop when you game over. After we correct the mistake and play the game again, survive time will stop forever when you die once. We finally solve this problem through many playtest. The playtest and tunning is helpful and need before you ship your game. To conclude, the process of making this graphical game make use of them in class knowledge and bring my game making skill into the next level. I appreciate the time I spend in making this game and tunning it into the final version.