Money or Love
In the beginning of this summer, I decided to do a mini game and I put a time limit for that project. The reason for that time limit is avoiding from procrastination :) The time limit was 3 weeks, and I completed most of the game.
I love the idea of controlling two characters at the same time and I remember that I first saw this game mechanic in Binary Land. (You can play this game here: http://www.atari.gen.tr/atari-oyunlari/binary-land.html) It makes you think twice while you're controlling the characters. So, I decided to use this game mechanic on my game. The name of the game is Money Or Love. It's a 2D puzzle game. In this game we have two characters; a boy and a girl. They move at the same time and in the same direction. The goal is collecting the gold with the boy; and collecting the heart with the girl, then putting them in any box. In some levels, avoiding from lava is needed.
Before starting this project I wanted to use and learn an HTML5-JavaScript game library to develop a game and I found Crafty(http://craftyjs.com/). It's free and easy to do a 2D game. It has a good documentation and it has some tutorials to make a game from the beginning.
For the levels, I use basic tile map logic by writing in a text file with different letters and then decode them. The movement of the characters are also tile based. They make their movement in one tile length(16 pixels) and this makes them move equally. I painted all the characters, tiles and items in GIMP and found the sounds from as3sfxr(http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/).
A difficulty while I was working on this game was the colliding of the characters and other movable objects. The problem was if two objects, staying side by side, starts moving, then one of the object stay and other one moves. I guess one of them collides early and stops. So I changed the offsets of the colliders because the default collider component is not worked properly.
After I designed 10 levels, I decided to do some playtesting with my friends. I put a "How to play" image next to the game and waited for their feedbacks. One of the feedback was about the movement of the characters. Players wanted to move the characters while they are holding down the keys. They told me that pressing the key again and again for the movement is really boring. They were right :) I completely forgot that because I was concentrated on tile based movement(the characters have to move 16 pixels or multiples) The other feedback was about the sound when players accomplish the level. They told me that the sound was confusing; and they were not being sure that they succeeded or failed.
You can play Money Or Love from here: http://stdhomes.ieu.edu.tr/efealacamli/moneyorlove/ I'm still working on the movement and collisions. You can send your feedbacks about it, below in the comments section. Update: Source code is available on Github.
