Category: ITU Copenhagen

Alright, so I have a game, or at least a prototype of it. How can I improve it?

Because if I had the time, I would definitely work out a few quirk things that ended up unfinished.

First of all, character animation.

Because I actually made different sprites for the main character running around, at least in one direction, but I didn’t have the time to look into how to implement this in an 8 axis movement. It’s one minor thing that can make a strong difference between a sketchy prototype and a polished build.

But that’s purely aesthetics without much effect on the gameplay.

On the other hand the island, the gameworld itself, could do with a lot more detail and greatly improve the final effect. After all this is a game about exploration, and what good is exploring if there isn’t anything interesting to visit?

Stine likes games that show a lot of different areas full of mysteries, with old ruins, swamps, dangerous seas and more. For my prototype I had to put the limit at some point and I could never focus on making any area strong in characterization. I also couldn’t give my gameworld a nice, consistent story. It all ended up quite rushed in that aspect to tell the truth.

Then I would love to make the quests more interesting. I mean, right now as it is the game is full of fetch quests: go here, take this, find this guy, blow this cave, open that chest… A little bit more depth would have been very desirable. And that means lines upon lines of code, of course. It wouldn’t be so hard now that I have a grasp on the basics of scripting but it’s not something that I am willing to jump on right now.

And of course we have combat. Somehow I always wanted some sort of simple, old 2D Zelda styled combat in the game, even if to provide some extra difficulty in completing the quests. Again, this is not a core element of the game, but I really think it could evolve the gameplay a lot more. Not very complex combat sequences, but just basic sword fighting. The idea of using spells against enemies is also there, but that’s more of a second thought, even though it would be very cool.

Now, I don’t have any real plans of continuing this game any further, but I do want to keep using this little island of mine as a test lab to try out new ideas I might come up with for other games. It has the framework and now I know the tools. I’m still not perfect with coding, but I can definitely do much better now with the experience I have gained this semester.

And again, you will probably be able to try this prototype out yourself in the portfolio section. Keep reading for an update soon!

It’s taken forever, but it’s finally done!

The final, working prototype of my game Adventure Island (tentative title, I know the name is already taken) is now finished, complete, and will stay as it is for my final hand-in for the course User Experience & Prototyping at the IT University of Copenhagen. It’s very much unfinished, it has flaws everywhere, but there is just so much that you can do with a prototype given the amount of time that we had.

So how did it turn out?

Well… I would say that I’m quite happy with it. Especially considering that up until this moment I had never done an entire game with the Unity Engine by myself, all from scratch. Sure, I had worked before with Unity (R.E.C, Mr. Optimistic and The Hitchhiker), but I always worked with other team members for those, and always at least one of them a programmer. This time however it was only me. That means that I had to learn how to code JavaScript from zero while at the same time designing the level, making the graphics (ok, they weren’t that many, I got lazy at some point and I reused sprites all over again) and playtesting and making changes.

Not to mention that I had to remember that this game was for one person in special, not me.

I have to thank Samuel Walz and Martin Fasterholdt for helping me with some random bugs I was encountering in the build (as usual the typical mistakes: I left one “;” out of place, or “GameObject” should not have started with capital G).

But besides that I think it turned out quite nicely. The quest is reasonably long for the average player to do in one sitting without going by too fast, the world is expansive enough so that it encourages the exploration I was aiming for, and players can take different approaches at beating the game.

And you can drown in the lake. Be careful with that.

As I said there are still some bugs here and there, but those are going to have to stay for now.

I plan on making the build available for everyone in my portfolio soon enough, but that one will most definitely have a few tweaks to make it more polished for public availability. Stay updated!