Digital Media Project Blog

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The Final Project - Finished

Today I finished my final project and uploaded the game on Itch.io to be playable online.  I can’t really believe I finished it. I’ve spent so much time working on my project it doesn’t even feel real. I’m really proud of myself. I chose to create something I had no previous experience with. I can’t even tell how many times I was working on this project and coding my game in which I kicked myself over choosing to create a game. To say it was a huge challenge is an understatement. I spent most of my time just learning C# and doing test runs. I must have made 5 different versions and trials throughout the year I honestly lost count. But it was all worth it. I’m really proud of what I have created considering I had 0 experience with game developing when I started.  My game turned out pretty close to what I had envisioned and I’m just really happy with what I have created. It’s great to be done. 

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Game Preview

I have finished designing and developing my game. What I’ve been doing today is sorting out the little tweaks I still had to make before submitting. Things like really narrowing down the speed of the player, gravity scale, the speed increase scale, jump time counter, the restart time, fix the random point and obstacle thresholds and loads more.  All these values were on default while I was building my game but now that the game is built I want to tailor them in a way that will provide the player with the best gaming experience. 

One thing I was struggling to do but managed to do it today was scale the game so it fits all screen sizes no matter where you play it. I was going into several forums and searching up many videos to help me. I ended up finding the solution on my own, it was right there starring at me in the face actually. All I needed to do was quite literally change the Canvas UI Scale mode from “Constant Pixels” to “Scale with Screen Size”. That was literally the fix to a problem I was having for 2 days. Goes to show that sometimes you really just need to stop for a moment so you can gain new perspectives. 

The game is now scaling perfectly as Unity allows you to preview different screen sizes and with all the preview tests I have done I haven’t had a single issue since. 

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Artwork

After yesterday’s “mental health day” I’ve been feeling a lot more inspired. I decided to change the background artwork for the Main Menu screen, the Gameplay screen and the Death Menu screen. I’ve been designing them today and I feel a lot more satisfied and happy with my game since making these artistic changes. 

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A New Perspective

Today I have decided to take a “mental health day” off from my project. It’s been increasingly stressful at home and it’s been taking a tool on me. 

I’ve been working on my final project everyday for weeks now and with tensions rising at home with all that is going on I’ve become a bit burned out. I wasn’t able to focus completely in the last couple days and just needed a day to revitalise and energise. 

I also wanted a fresh mind to be able to look at my project from different angles. I have been thinking about maybe changing some of the artwork I had initially done. Since I’ve been testing out the project and fine tuning details now I was dissatisfied with the backgrounds I had initially designed for my game. It just didn’t look how I imagined it would. Maybe its because I’ve been looking at these designs for too long but since I still have time I decided today I would start redesigning some things. Maybe this is what I need to regain some excitement about it in the midst of all this. I’ve had many new ideas today to improve the overall look and design of my game and I will start implementing them tomorrow as soon as the artwork is finalised.  A day to relax my mind allowed me to look at my project from a different perspective and I’m excited about the changes I plan to make. 

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Sound Effects

Using Bfxr.net I made sound effects for the “jump” action and the “point pickup” action for my player. It really added more depth to the game. 

I asked my brothers who are both avid gamers for their inout in the sound effects. Since I had created the “jump” and “point pickup” sound effects I wanted to know if they really sounded like the action they portrayed. 

What I did was play the sounds to them without any identification and ask them what actions they sounded like. I didn’t ask both of them at the same time as I didn’t want their answers influencing one another and I wanted honest feedback. 

Both my brothers identified the correct action to the sound so the feedback was great. I will definitely be adding those sound effects to my game now

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Death Menu

I have just added a death menu to my game which is activated when the player dies. The menu is within my endless scene which makes the screen appear darker with “Game Over” showing up when the player dies. It also has 2 buttons with the option to restart the game or go back to the main menu scene which allows the player to quit the game.

It is all finally coming together I’m really excited. 

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Main Menu

I am very excited because today I added a main menu scene to my game. The main menu scene includes the logo of my game, 2 buttons - one to start the game and one to quit and some instructions on how to play the game. 

I have been working on my game for so long and adding these extra details just really improves it and finally makes it look like its coming together! Both buttons are working perfectly, its just really cool to see it all coming together like that.

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Jump Function Update

In a previous post I talked about giving my player a function so it couldn’t jump mid air but I have since decided to overturn that decision.  My player before was able to have a jump boost by holding down the space bar but as I test ran it myself and asked others to do a test run, the feedback on that affordance was underwhelming.  Both my brothers who are avid gamers tested my game and said that the jump boost by holding down the space bar actually hindered their performance in the game. At times when they wanted to just do a small jump but accidentally held the space bar for too long the player jump forward quite far making them miss the next platforms.  What I did to fix this was remove that functionality completely and add a double jumped to the player that is activated only when the space bar is pressed twice. I also added the option for the double jump to be activated when the player is in mid air to be able to reach further platforms with more accuracy. 

I asked my brothers to test run the game with this added affordance and both said it made their experience playing the game much more seamless.

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Score System Update

As previously mentioned my score system worked in relation to the distance the player traveled in the game. I still had the “CV Points” but they were not doing anything. The player just collected them and it had no effect in the score.  I realised this isn’t great as it gives the player no incentive to pick up that object so I decided to maintain the score as is in relation to the distance traveled in the game however the “CV Points” add a boost to the score once collected. This is so the player still has some incentive to pick up those objects and it actually works even better than my initial idea.

As my idea is a satirical take on the job market for recent university graduates of my generation the game is an endless runner as you always keep going and working trying to get to the top your experience hence the “CV Points” are a boost in your journey in both the game and in life. So that actually ended up working out really well. 

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Score System and Saving a High Score

I must have been working on this for days and wrecking my brain on a way to not lose the player’s high score once the game is exited. 

I got a fairly straight forward score system to work. Initially i wanted the score to increase only as the player picked up the “CV Points”, although when doing more research on Endless Runner games that is hardly ever the case. Most Endless Runners have a score system that is related to the distance the player has gotten in the game therefore, I decided to make my score system work in the same fashion. It just made more sense. My game runs infinitely so to gave a score system that only calculates the “CV Points” the player has collected defeats the purpose.

I managed to get my score system working quite well but one thing I was unable to do was to save the player’s high score once the game had been exited. That is not what I wanted. I wrecked my brain for days on how to solve that issue until I learned about the PlayerPrefs function.  The PlayerPrefs function allows for data to be stored in the browser or device in which the player is playing the game. Linking the PlayerPrefs to my high score system solved that issue and now the high score is maintained even when the player exits the game. 

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Physics2D Grounded

As i was initially coding the game I needed to find a way for the payer to detect the ground a simple easy way to do this is to tag the platforms and platform prefabs as a ground layer so the player could only jump when he was grounded and not jump mid air. 

This worked for a while until i started to develop the game further and then i ran into some troubleshooting issues. 

The issues that I had was that the entire platform was tagged as ground so even if the player hit the sides or when underneath a platform he was still attached to it and able to jump. This is not what I wanted. How i solved this issue was by creating an empty object as a child of the player with a radius point of 0.1 at the bottom centre of the player which would detect the ground and when he was grounded. I coded that into my player script so only when the bottom of my player is touching the platforms is he able to jump so I no longer had those issues. 

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Object Pooler

Object Pooling is a technique I learned to do to solve lagging issues with my game. 

As my game has a random infinite generator to generate the platforms I added a destroyer script to erase the platforms the player has already passed and generate new ones the gameplay scene passes the generation point. This solved a lot of my issues regarding memory as before all the platforms were stacking up on the game taking up a lot of memory.

Even though that destroyer script solved that issue it created a new one. My game was lagging terribly as the script has to 1) erase previous platforms and 2) generate new ones all at once. With Object Pooling I was able to solve that issue by writing the script to instead of destroying the platforms to just deactivate them. I added an array of 4 different sized platforms to be generated randomly with only 3 of each being used. Once the player passed a platform it got deactivated until the random generator reactivated it down the line to add that same platform back in. This completely solved all of my lagging problems and the game runs so much more smoothly now. 

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Project Changes

We’re in some very unusual and uncertain times. To say that all the stress hasn’t affected me would be a lie. I came back home early to mid March and as the situation escalates in Qatar I have not left the house in about a month.  A lot has been getting to me but it’s also given me plenty of time to reflect upon my work especially my Final Project. My initial idea was to create an app game for IOS and I begun coding for it but I soon encountered many problems with Xcode and it was no longer a reality. This is mainly due to wanting to add affordances to my game that would not work well as a mobile game.

One change that I made was to start coding the game for HTML5 platforms. I had to restart as most of my code written for Xcode was not useable but have been able to get many things going. In my initial idea my player would be moving autonomously at a constant speed, but after playing around with it for a while the game just started to get boring. Yes, the platforms are being generated randomly at different spaces, different heights but after a while you get the hang of the game and it can go on for a very long time. My game is indeed an endless runner but I don’t want to turn it into a mindless boring game. One thing that I decided to add was a speed increase after the player has covered a certain amount of ground. I'm test running this now but it should add an extra element of challenge and stimulation to the game. 

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Competitor - Treasure Hunter

Treasure hunter is an 8-bit platformer game independently developed by João Marques and hosted in the web games website www.coolmathgames.com.

The game is set in what is designed to look like the inside of a castle with suspended platforms and scattered gold coins. The player’s aim is to collect all gold coins in a level without touching the spikes in order to open the treasure chest which allows you to progress onto the next level. Treasure Hunter’s character moves autonomously through the game changing direction when he reaches the end of the screen.

There are obvious similarities between my game and Treasure Hunter. My aesthetics and design was very much inspired by 80s Indiana Jones arcade games and it is evident Treasure Hunter was too. The autonomous mechanism is utilised in Treasure Hunter and it works very well with the format. The only issue is that the character moves a bit too fast and I will look into decreasing the speed for my game so its easier and less frustrating to play.

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Competitor - Icy Tower

Icy Tower is a platform game developed by Free Lunch Design. It was developed as a freeware computer game initially released for Windows in 2001.

 The game is set in a tower in which the player's aim is to jump from platform to platform climbing further up the tower to reach the highest possible floor without falling and plunging off screen. The higher the player's character climbs the faster the platforms move down and the harder the game becomes.

 Icy tower was the initial inspiration for my game idea and I am implementing many of its gameplay design to my own game.  

 Icy Tower however is still only available to download and play on desktops and there is no app version available.

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Competitor - Temple Run

Temple Run is a 3D endless runner game developed by Imangi Studios released in 2011. Temple Run was initially only available for IOS devices however, in 2012 and 2013 versions compatible with Andriod and Windows Phone were released. The aim of the game is for the player to help their explorer who has obtained an ancient relic from a sacred temple to run from "evil demon monkeys" that are chasing him dodging obstacles and collecting gold coins along the way.

 Temple run is similar to my game in its design aspects. My game has also taken inspiration from the explorer/adventurer Indiana Jones type character and aesthetic. However that is where similarities end. As a Temple Run player temple run is extremely anxiety inducing. Its sound and gameplay design is designed to keep the player on edge to further their experience of running away. The game gets harder as you are further along with the player running faster thus making it more difficult to dodge the obstacles. The monkey sounds from the chasing evil demon monkeys are present at odd moments of the game which can be a little startling.

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The Prevalence and Correlates of Depression, Anxiety, and Stress in a Sample of College Students

The Franciscan University Counselling centre over 4 years experienced an increase of 231% in yearly visits as well as a 173% increase in total yearly clients. This trend has been observed at many universities as mental health pose significant problems for many college students. The object of this study is to observe the potential correlates of depression, anxiety and stress in a sample of college students

This study analysed a sample of 374 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 24 attending the Franciscan University by completing a survey consisting of demographic questions instructing its participants to rate the level of concern associated with challenges faced in their daily lives 

Results indicated that the top three concerns related to academic performance, pressure to succeed and post graduation plans. The most stressed, anxious and depressed students were found to be upperclassmen (students in the second to last and final year of university)

Stress is a an inevitable and natural part of life however is has become more prevalent amongst university students. In the United States nearly 10% of all university students have been diagnosed with/treated for depression over the past year

Beiter, R., Nash, M., McCrady, D., Rhoades, M., Linscomb, M., and Sammut, S. 2015. The prevalence and correlates of depression, anxiety, and stress in a sample of college students. Journal of Affective Disorders. 173, pp. 90-96.