My Game Design Journey

[jessegillesigb220]

Assignment 3 Post Mortem

14 Weeks.... I can’t believe we’ve made it so far so quickly. This final prototype has come so far compared to the first prototype I built all those weeks ago. And accross all aspects too, its graphics are WAY better, its got a premise, the functionalities are ten times more engaging and complicated and .... its actually fun.

The thing that really seperated this game from the other prototypes I’ve built so far though was the completeness of it. The polish and the consistent theme throughout the game. Having two extra people working alongside me, allowed us to split up tasks and achieve jobs which we would normally have deemed non-essential. The final game is a beautiful asteroider where players fly a spaceship through an asteroid field, collecting gems from destroyed asteroids and fighting off space pirates.

If I could improve a part of my process, I would have had playtesting done on the original prototype before we started planning on improvements. I think that it wasn’t until after the first playtest that I realised there was more importance to sprites and animations then I first thought. In the first version the sprites were just used to display an object, it was actually originally just simple geometry shapes, and I thought my task of redesigning sprites would involve just making it look better. However I realised after the first playtest that it was also important to use sprites to convey more information about the state of the game, or the use of items. I made an animation for the ship that showed it was damaged when shields went down. This was useful for players who were so involved that they hadn’t taken their eyes off the ship to see their shield bars. I also made the powerups more enticing and obvious about what they did. If I were to change one thing about the prototype it would be the way that the levels change. Currently it operates on a level up kind of model. Once a certain score is reached a congratulations screen is displayed then the next level loads. And you start from scratch, I’d like to change it to a continous mode, where the level doesn’t reload everything. I’d also like to implement a lives feature, because I feel like when you are really involved in a game this gives you an opportunity to stay invested and play for longer.

But all in all I’m very proud of this prototype, and I’m very happy with my progress in the unit, I have learnt alot this semester and can’t wait to put my skills to the test again in future games.

[jessegillesigb220]

Assignment  3 Progress

My task this week for our game was to improve the sprites we were using. Originally the game was using simply geometry shapes as asteroids. In photoshop I drew up nine different proper game ready asteroids and floated them around our GDevelop environment. This instantly changed the look and feel of the game to give it a more consistent flow and art style. I also edited the sprite for the ship to give it 3 animations. A take off animation, a flying animation and a engine shutoff animation. Although in the scheme of things, these were only small implementations, they really brought the game together more. Sometimes its the little things that count.

My focus on the assignment was mostly to do with the visual aspects of the game. It was my job to immerse players in the game with captivating graphics and animations. However during our first playtesting session I realised there was a more important aspect to my role than this which I initially overlooked. My sprites needed to also convey key peices of information back to the player, they should have a look that players can form immediate assumptions about. I redesigned the powerup cannisters so they looked exciting and relevant. I made the shield generator sprite a glowing blue that players immediately associated with their shield. And I made the rapid fire an electric yellow that demonstrated power and speed.

I also redesigning the gems, I gave them a shiner look and a bit of a glow. I also gave them a flickering timer effect so that players were enticed to chase them down before they disappeared.

[jessegillesigb220]

Assignment 3 Playtesting

Today we performed our first play testing interview. We have only been working on the project for about a week so it wasnt completely finished yet so I was skeptical about performing it but I’m glad we did, because the early feedback we got was crucial in the roadmap for how we continued building our project. Some major comments that our playtester made were :  “ I think the gems should have something that makes them standout, a glow or something that makes them more tempting.” “ Change the power generator to a different sprite, I thought it was a bomb that was going to explode on me. “ These comments made us realise we had to do some work on our sprites, there would need to be a redesigning of them to make the game easier to understand. We also were able to identify some player habits that were causing play behaviour which we did not want. We noticed that the player was not moving around, instead standing still in the middle of the screen and shooting all the asteroids at will while the screen filled up with gems. He proceeded to do this until there gems everywhere then went around and collected them all at once. This made the game very easy and had little to no challenge to it. It completely removed the mechanic of flying around, avoiding collisions with asteroids. I thought back to the lecture earlier this year about balancing. In which we were told that the solution wasn’t always to be direct, but instead identify what the real problem is thats causing this and change that.

In order to fix this in a way that wouldn’t negatively impact gameplay we decided it would be a great implementation to  give the gem an expiration time, this would force players to move around and collect gems before they disappear, also adding a bit of a race against the clock mechanic to the game.

[jessegillesigb220]

Assignment Three Development Progress

I was put into a group with Chris and Leighton, together we decided to use Chris’ game Astro Miner.

Astro Miner is a game where you must navigate a dangerous asteroid field and blow up asteroids in the hope of finding rare and valuable minerals. If you take damage you can salvage energy cells to replenish your shields, and utilize a powerful blast attack to clear large areas of asteroids.

I really love Chris’ idea for a game, its a really great concept. I was put into the role of lead artist aswell as playtesting agent. So a large part of my role in this project will be improving the graphics of the game and the implementation of the welcome screen to include a more immersive feel to the game. I’m inspired by jetpack joyride in this instance and think I can definitely do something similar to this. I think it would set the scene perfectly in this game. I also feel like I can really bring this game together with a consistent look and feel thats just what it needs.

The game loop involves flying the ship around an asteroid field, avoiding collisions with the asteroids, destroying the asteroids to find rare gems, and collecting the rare gems to increase the player’s score. The game itself would have multiple levels of increasing difficulty and reward.

[jessegillesigb220]

Assignment 2 Final Design

I finally finished both my sell sheet and my one page designs. I’m actually really happy with them. I followed the blue reef sillhouette across into the one page design aswell. I felt that the sell sheet really captured the essence of what the game was. Portraying a sense of adventure, competition and novelty which I hope would entice people to try it. I tried to keep all of the elements on the page fitting in with the theme so that nothing looked out of place. My one page, covered all of the features of the game in enough depth that someone could make it from scratch, but also kept from being overcrowded and cluttered. It really made me take into account the importance of obvious imagery. If an idea is done preoperly it needs as little textual explanation as possible.

[jessegillesigb220]

Racing Post Mortem

My third game and by far the most complete. As opposed to the last two games, this one had a completely finished Introduction scene with instructions which had a large impact on how the game was received. This was inspired largely from readings of chapter 9 of Fullerton’s book which discussed the importance of playtesting in game design. It illustrated the importance of testing. But not just testing myself. Testing from multiple people of different video game skill levels and backgrounds. Doing this gave me incredibly valuable insight into the shortcomings of my game, and the shackles I was placing on my game by not taking people’s opinions into account.  Many players gave feedback about the difficulty of the game, and how it was “impossible to beat” the opposing swimmers. My first response to this would have been to slow down the other swimmers, but Fullerton talks about finding the root of the problem, so I investigated properly and really watched why people weren’t winning. I noticed that the swimmers were getting a huge headstart because players weren’t familiar with the key movements before playing, and didn’t have their muscle memory trained in. So after creating a practice period in the waiting screen with an interactive demo / controls ( similar to the old rugby world cup games ) I noticed an instant improvement. It was a good feeling to improve the game without needing to nerf it or remove the challenge. One thing that I would change about the design of the prototype would be a more centred camera over the player, with crowd noise and graphics on either side. I feel like this would provide a much more immersive and inspiring atmosphere to inspire players to greatness. It would also help to provide more premise and assist players in acheiving the ultimate goal of ‘flow’.

If I could have changed anything about the way I developed this prototype it would be the way i went about doing sprites. I had a differerent animation for every possible combination of movements the player could be in, however a much more effective way of doing it would have been to split the player into 3 parts. Body, Left arm and Right arm. Each body piece could have had their seperate sprites and animations. I then could have positioned their origin points next to eachother to keep them in their proper positions. This would have made the whole process much easier and less complicated.

[jessegillesigb220]

Assignment 2 Progress

I decided to choose my Asteroider game for my assignment two, as I felt this game was the most graphically pleasing and it was also the one that inspired me the most. I really wanted to emerge people into the power of the deep, so I have chosen to colour the whole page a deep blue with a coral reef background to really reinforce the premise and set the scene of the environment. Im hoping that by using silhouettes and outlines it will provoke a sense of mystery that will draw people in to my sell sheet. This is the start of my sell sheet, unfortunately I’m no graphic designer or artist but luckily silhouettes mean you dont have to be. ;)

[jessegillesigb220]

Racing Game development post

The third game and by the most complete. QWEIOP really focuses on precise and quick key presses as its main mechanic. My first version of the game started with a loading screen with text instructions on how to play. However in my first iteration of play testing I noticed that the main reason players were losing was they had a slow start because they took a while to figure out the controls. These concerns were also echoed in their feedback “ At first it was really difficult to work out what to do without being told ” and “The other swimmers were too fast, its impossible to win”. I was a bit confused because personally I found the game wasn’t hard to win, but was just the right difficulty. However new players struggled so much they became frustrated and didn’t want to play again. I realised it was a scenario just like Fullerton talked about where developers work so long on a project that they forget about the player in their own quest to make their game live up to their own expectations.  I realised how important it was that players understood how the game worked before they played. With this in mind I put much more effort into the introduction screen which featured instructions on how to play, and changed it to include an interactive instruction showing them which buttons to push. ( seen below )

 I then altered the speeds of the contestant swimmers so one was much slower in order to give the player a sense of achievement to beat atleast one swimmer in order to keep them playing longer.

In my second iteration of play testing I noticed it ran much smoother, players were able to familiarise themselves with the controls and patterns of their fingers before shooting the gun and the reviews reflected this. With 2 players scoring 4/5 and one player 5/5 to the criteria ‘ The design was clear, and I understood the objectives of the game.’   Some players “ Almost breaking the keyboard” as they punched through their combos.

[jessegillesigb220]

Racing Elevator Pitch

QWEIOP

Represent your country as you strive for first place in this paralympic swimming race emulation. Control both your arms through an array of movements using 6 keys to move different joints, ( Q W E ) for the left arm and ( I O P) for the right arm. Challenge yourself to quickly press these buttons in the right order to swim your paralympian accross the pool towards the finish line as you race for the glory of that gold medal on the world’s largest stage.

This is a button masher racing gamer, where players must be precise yet speedy in their button mashing to successfully move the arms of their character in a swimming race.

The primary mechanics of the game will be the movement of the armaments of the paralympian. Players must accurately press the keys Q W E   or   I O P to move their swimmer’s arms in order to beat the other racers.

This will be set on the olympic stage, thousands of spectators, lots of sound, cheering, and in the pool : a calm before the storm. Once the race starts however it is a button mashing churning pool of competition. It will be a 2d top down view that would easily show your position in relation to your adversaries. At a time when the paralympics were so prominent on television and with such a large current following this game is targeted for all ages and audiences. The complexities of the controls mean that even adults can have a laugh while playing this extremely difficult racing game.

[jessegillesigb220]

Asteroids Post Mortem

I learnt alot from my first project and this time around really focused alot more on immersing the player into the game through the use of a more interesting premise, which used consistent graphical themes. I really wanted to bring more engagement into my game and after reading Fullerton’s views on levels of engagement and the way that serious games attempt to create transformational play by shaping and altering player’s real lives I was inspired. This is what every game designer dreams of, the ability to create something and change the way people think about life, almost like coding the real world. Marine conservation has always been a big part of my life, having grown up in a family of keen adventurers and scuba divers, so I decided to create a game relevant to the conservation of overfishing and shark behaviour. I decided to challenge stereotypical portrayals of sharks in video games, by making it the playable character, rather than the dangerous villain. The aim of this was to create transformational play by immersing players in the life of the shark and to see their point of view.

Although as you can see in the above game demonstration; the shark is still committing violence against ships, the prototype I created does it in a way that shows humans as the aggressor. The sheer amount of boats that just do not stop spawning, will hopefully lead players to form a connection for themselves on the realities of overfishing. However if i could change the way I developed this game, I would have focused more on creating an introduction level / story scene which would more effectively placed players into the plight of their character, as I feel that some player’s may view their actions as the shark as malicous.

If I could change anything in the design of the prototype it would be to expand upon the goals of the player. Rather than just having the goal of the game being to DESTROY ships, it would be more beneficial to transformative play if there was another element to the game that exemplified the goal of PROTECTING marine life. I think this could be done by adding some sort of vulnerable NPCs ( like fish that must be saved ) which act as lives. The ships try to catch these NPCs and if you dont sink them before they sail away it takes away from your life bar.

[jessegillesigb220]

Interesting Mechanic

 Although it may not be the most unique or original mechanic ever made, I’ve always thought that time manipulation such as in Grand Theft Auto Five is one of the most interesting and enjoyable mechanics in modern day gaming. 

This mechanic not only creates extremely fun and immersive gameplay but it also provides players with a chance to gain a repreive from the hectic driving situations that one can find themselves in in GTA 5. The immersion into the game that this ability provides is a massive boost to the potential of generating ‘flow’. As Tracy Fullterton explains a balance between challenge and ability results in an optimal experience for users. The level of concentration that driving succesfully at high speeds in GTA 5 requires often means that players would be experiencing flow. However crashing, slowing down, bumping into something are all methods of breaking a gamer out of this channel of flow. By adding this time manipulation ability, developers have provided the player with a method to remain in their state of flow, as well as further merge their actions and awareness together, by creating a mechanic which can help them avoid collisions, take high speed corners while remaining challenging and enjoyable in order to extend the experience of flow as long as possible. However, it would not be enjoyable if this ability could be used ‘willy-nilly’ all the time, as the game would not remain challenging.  In order to ‘balance’ this, developers attached a resource to this ability. Using it would chew through the amount of time you had remaining, meaning that players had to seriously consider when was the best time to use it.  As Fullerton says; the purpose of manipulating variables such as the amount of ‘slow time’ the gamer has all comes back to the player experience you are trying to create. In this case, developers are trying to increase the amount of time that gamers can experience flow by maintaining high speed driving, but they needed to be careful that it still remained challenging.

[jessegillesigb220]

Asteroids Development Post

FUNCTIONALITY!! That has been the theme for me this week. My asteroid game has a key mechanic : Limiting the range which it can fire. I wanted to have the ability to fire wherever the mouse clicks, but only at a maximum range of 300 from the player. This wasn’t quite as simple as i had hoped.... Before I could move onto sprites, movement, collisions or anything that would make the game a game, I needed to have this core mechanic down pat.

I laid down the foundation for the mechanic and made my sprite follow wherever my mouse was. I then attached a sprite onto my mouse which showed a splash area of effect gif I made to show where the projectile would land. Now for the tricky part, adding some structure to it. I did this with maths. My favourite... All those times in high school that I swore I’d never need Sine, Cosine and Tan... Well guess what Mrs Murray, you were right.

As demonstrated in my diagram below, I used triangles in order to calculate the position that the area of effect sprite would stop in order to remain inline with the mouse but at a distance of 300 from the sprite.

I won’t bore you with all the mathematic details but essentially you can work out  Θ through using D, XL and YL. Then with  Θ and H  you can work out x and y and then take into account the sprite distance from the origin. The method of whether you use cosine or sine changes based on which quadrant the mouse is in from the fish. In this example it is below and to the right of the fish so I would use acos and add the values. ( See second reference picture below )

After about 4 days of gruelling work and bugs and restarting my theory about 10 times I finally had a working prototype! The splash effect sprite would stop at a distance of 300 from the player and it was inline with the mouse. I added code for the bullet to travel to this point and destroy any ships along the way.

I’m definitely glad that I followed Fullerton’s advice and focused on my functionality before all else because the amount of times that I flipped my desk and restarted was insane. Once I had my functionality down pat, it was easy to start focusing on completeness and balance. I put together a small shark sprite animation and a cannonball to help give the game the theme I was after. Finally I continued testing and playing around with balancing the game. After reading chapter 10 of the Fullerton’s book, I realised how important balancing was. Initially my shark moved too fast, fired cannonballs too far and at too fast a rate. This made it almost impossible to be killed and the game way too easy, players were not thinking about their shots and just firing at will, making my primary mechanic negligible.

 In response I lowered the range and lowered the speed of both the cannonball and the shark. I was finally happy when the game met the goals I set for my player experience; it was of the scope and complexity I envisioned and all the elements were working together. Players were trying to setup combinations of sinking ships and choosing the best placements for their cannonballs.

Here is a short video demonstrating my working prototype :)

Link at [](https://gyazo.com/c082d17a3501fc7bbb54af666cf5dbc7)

[jessegillesigb220]

Asteroids Elevator Pitch

Some of my favourite games have been asteroids ( or similar to ) so this week I’m really looking forwarding to creating my own!  Sharkfin Shoot

Take back the oceans from greedy deep sea fishing boats and avoid being turned into sharkfin soup. Play as a genetically modified pirate shark who shoots cannonballs out of his mouth to sink as many ships as possible in order to save shark kind. Earn extra points for sinking multiple ships at once as this endless armada threatens your waters. In a game of sink or swim, remind them who the apex predator is.

This game is an action-adventure asteroid game, with a slight twist. It’s in the ocean. I really wanted to create something a little different from your typical asteroider game, so this version will be based on the high seas. As a genetically modified shark the playable character can shoot cannon balls out of its mouth to sink ships. But similar to pirate ships back in the 16th century the range of the projectile is limited. A large part of this game is players planning where their projectile will land, with a maximum range being set. This combination of a slow projectile speed and limited range will open up possibilites for combos as cannonballs will be able to sink multiple ships on its way to its landing site.

The movement will be top down, and as sharks can only swim the way they are facing it will be limited to forwards and backwards. This means that keyboard as well as mouse will be used to move around.

The city should be a 19th / 20th century setting, and audience members should be prompted to question their own morals when it comes to their environmental views on overfishing and shark conservation.

This game has a very broad audience as the theme can be challenging for all age groups, from 7+. Its potential for complex play should keep even adults entertained as they challenge themselves to plan large combos and sink as many vessels in one shot as possible.

[jessegillesigb220]

Platformer Post Mortem

Wow, it’s amazing to think about how much work goes into a video game, and mine was just a simple prototype! I really fell in love with the way I could create something from nothing. I’ve always had a very logically minded brain, so the ease at which I could craft rules and interactions between sprites helped me create a game which I enjoyed playing! Inline with what Fullerton suggested I pushed graphics to the side and used the default animations & sprites provided by the workshop content and focused solely on creating gameplay. I found iterative testing to be extremely helpful in the crafting of this game, and I could break it down into clear releases based on player feedback and testing, each one feeling significantly more enjoyable than its predecessor.

However, although I enjoyed playing my game it was far from perfect.. If I could change one thing about my prototype it would be to add more dramatic elements to my game and an invitation to play. My lack of dramatic elements such as story, proper premise and character made it very difficult for players to engage with their character and motivate them to complete the game. My prototype lacked any kind of onboarding, introduction or explanation of both how to play and why to play. This really didn’t give gamers a clear understanding of the controls and also a motivation to play the game. I think a short introduction just like we can see in Jetpack Joyride would have been the key to bringing my prototype together.

If I had to change the design of my prototype I would like to have made a larger level with differing challenges, and power-ups. Currently my game had a number of enemies on platforms and a health potion to heal you. I would love to have created another consumable that perhaps gives you the ability to double jump for a short time. I think this could have really opened up the possibility of flow, as introducing an advanced method of jumping which players have already mastered as well as an increased difficulty in obstacles transforms their jumping into a challenging activity that requires skill. This would also have added another objective for the game : Race against a clock, as players would have to double jump through platforms before their powerup ran out.

[jessegillesigb220]

Platformer Testing

In this week’s workshop, I had nothing near a full working game, the game was missing a few key features and a general polishing. But as discussed in the Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton, iterative testing is an important part of the development cycle, and it’s never too early to test your game! So we did some play testing.... My game was tested by four other students and the responses that came back were all very similar. This was handy as it showed a few key implementations that my game was missing. It was consistently said that the game was missing an over-all theme, a background image, sounds or sprites that were similarly themed would make more sense. User One said : “It’s a bit confusing becuase you are fighting aliens, as a spaceman, but using 17th century looking fuse bombs and going through brick made doors”. In order to smooth the game out I need to pick a consistent theme and stick to it, this would help players to generate a story in their own heads. Perhaps even a short cutscene from the beginning, similar to something like in Jetpack Joyride to give it a purpose. Another common comment made was the mechanics of throwing bombs, players didn’t like that the bombs were dropped directly below their sprite. It would be more engaging if the bomb was thrown up in the air and travelled at an angle, requiring more skill to hit.

Player 3 said they loved the positioning of a group of small platforms which required precise jumps to overcome and avoid falling into a lava pool. After failing twice they passed on the third attempt and I could see that they learnt from mistakes in attempt one and two, which was good to see! Overall the game needs some small tweaks, but is getting there slowly but surely! 

[jessegillesigb220]

Platformer Game Development Post

Development Post Over the last week I worked on creating a 2D platformer game, although these type of games are not my favourites I learnt a lot in G Develop.

I started by creating a character who could run and jump, with aliens on each platform that moved back and forth. It was important to think about the starting spawns of these aliens as well as the positioning of the platforms in order to make it challenging yet not too hard for players. I then added a UI with a score and a health bar on it, this gave the ‘pointless’ game some substance, with consequences and a goal. I used collision detection to lower the health when the player hit an enemy, however I quickly discovered that this was quite buggy. As you can see this caused the player’s health to continuously drop while in contact with an enemy, which wasn’t ideal at all!

But how could I fix this? I played around with lowering the amount that was taken away, but this left odd numbers in different scenarios. Finally I found a solution: that was in the form of timers. I could use timers to check when the last time a player had hit an enemy and only take health if it was within two seconds. 

This reminded me of classical platform games, where when you collide with an enemy, your sprite flashes, you take damage, and for a brief period you are invulnerable to damage.

I found timers to be the most important aspect in my game as with this I could improve on many of my features, stopping them from occurring too frequently. E.G colliding with an enemy would continously drop your health until you were no longer touching, and dropping bombs was no fun if you didnt have to wait 3 seconds before you could throw another.

I finally had a game now that was playable! It didn’t look great, it was obviously missing features, but the key concepts were there. It was a prototype! However, after playing it through a few times I quickly realised it wasn’t very engaging, but I couldn’t figure out why! You could, jump, run, kill enemies. What more did a prototype need!?  After a night of bedtime reading, points raised by Fullerton in her book ( Game Design Workshop : A Play Centric Approach to Creating Games ) finally pointed me towards an answer. The game had no dramatic elements to engage players into a meaningful experience. 

The theory of ‘flow’ really struck a chord with me, and I realised how important it was to challenge players, to find a balance between challenge and ability. My level was too easy. Once a player figured out how to beat one alien platform it was all the same. I needed to increase the difficulty of platforms and really make them concentrate and actively play the game. I managed to acheive this by adding an area towards the end where the platform blocks were small and required precise, well thought out jumps in order to avoid falling into the pit of slime below.

The readings from Game Design Workshop were very helpful in my level design as it tought me that games are more than just shooting and jumping, without a proper balance between formal and dramatic elements I found that the game could be boring and not engaging to players. It was important to tweak these key mechanics so that players had to think about what they were doing and actively play rather than passively play. Although I primarily focused on improving my game’s dramatic elements through the use of challenge I think that a cutscene such as is used in both Jetpack Joyride and Templerun would give the game a great sense of premise and story, and perhaps even provide player’s with the freedom to create their own views on their character. 

[jessegillesigb220]

My first G-Develop Game

This week I was excited to start finally developing my first prototype in G-Develop. When I learnt we would be making a platformer my mind immediately jumped to some of my favourite platformer games: Mario, Metroid and of course terraria. I quickly figured out that we wouldn’t be making anything as complicated as these games, but nonetheless I was excited to jump in and bring a game to life.

Elevator Pitch

Bop - In an Indiana Jones meets new world exploration themed platformer; jump, blow and dodge your way through an alien world from level to level. Avoid the strange pink aliens as they patrol their platforms or simply blow them to goop with your trusty hand bombs, collect treasures and explore the wonders of the new world in this 2d platformer. 

The game uses typical jumping platform controls and the ability of throwing bombs at enemies as its primary mechanics. Set in an alien world similar to ours this game is designed for youth aged 8 - 14 as the funky alien sprites would be engaging for younger brains and the challenges well suited to their age group.

I am picturing this to be an interesting mix of western and futuristic cultures similar to the Indiana Jones comic below, or similar to themes seen in John Carter or Cowboys vs Aliens.

Image retrieved from 

https://braveandboldlost.blogspot.com/2016/11/indiana-jones-vs-aliens.html

G-Develop Experimentation This week I played around in G-Develop, I followed the tutorial to build a 2D jumping platformer, increasing my understand of how the drag and drop coder works. I focused mainly on enemy movement routines & animation changes. By the end I had a character who could run and jump, with different animations for each as well as an enemy who ran from spot to spot, also changing directions with rotation. Although my game does not look graphically appealing I made sure to follow advice from Tracy Fullerton and include minimal art and sound, focusing mostly on prototyping the kinesthetics and game mechanics. And I was definitely glad I did! It took a lot of alteration to make my character’s controls feel natural, even small things like the distance at which I had positioned platforms came into play ( some of them weren’t even reachable! ) By the end I had a game which looked terrible, but felt promising. I had a solid start for the game, and the amount of times I had deleted and re coded things was insane! Next week I would like to play around with collision detections, UI and dynamic object creation.