Month: March 2017

We asked our target audience about potential game names as we want our audience to feel as though they are part of the production of the game, just as we are! Whilst doing the game testing with the audience we asked them if they could think of a fitting name, this is what they came up with:

1. Laboratory Disaster

2. Coding Simulator

3. Robot Escape

4. Code Escape

Ryan and I have decided to follow on with ‘Code Escape’ because it is what we feel best fits in with the game. The fact that the main narrative objective of the game is to escape the lab using code goes hand in hand with the name and will help any visitors who don’t know anything about the game can associate what the game might be about.

On Wednesday the 22nd of March myself and Ryan gathered some audience feedback from our target audience. This week we managed to get 8 of the children to play our coding game and we will hopefully get some more this coming Wednesday, this time playing the second level if we can complete it in time!

We both took turns in explaining the game to the children and after that, we left them to play the game, some understood the game pretty well; whereas some required a little more guidance. This helped us a lot in making sure that we are precise with our explanation on how the game works etc (instruction screen perhaps). The first child understood that the “door.locked = True” meant the door was locked and to change that they needed to make the “True” section “False” and to do that he used the drag and drop feature which they were familiar with when using Scratch. Follow on from the drag and drop feature, when asked one of them said they were happy with the drag and drop which is what they have been learning and from this we gathered that if we inputted a typing feature they may struggle and they usually have all the code in front of them rather then writing/typing it.

– Dylan

Using assets that Dylan has designed I have created a working prototype of the first level for our game (name still pending). The aim of the level is to collect the RAM which triggers the robot’s memory (this is yet to be implemented as it is not necessary at this stage). Next appears a tablet/computer terminal with the code for a locked door which the player has to debug/fix by dragging the correct code in place of the current code. When complete and correct the tablet will close and the doors will unlock. The player then heads for the top door, presses ‘space’ and continues to the lower level, before heading to the end portal (which is just a placeholder for now). The level then ends and the next one begins.

Here is the demo video.

-Ryan

James has requested that myself and Ryan split up the workload so it will make the process smoother and quicker. We wanted to break the work up evenly so one of us wasn’t doing a substantial amount more than the other, we also tried to split it up so we could both work to the best of our abilities. Ryan will be focusing mainly on the character designs/animations and the game itself whereas I will be responsible for level designs, game assets and making the game a coding game!

– Dylan

I have been looking into and researching character animation for Construct 2 because we were struggling to figure it out. We have only ever done video animation before and nothing game related. From what I found we will need to re-create the robot character a number of times to each position it is needed in. For example while the player is still we need an ‘idle’ animation to give it some life – this will involve the hover effect moving, arms slightly moving to represent some sort of breathing (even though it’s a robot – we just want it to seem less static), perhaps a blinking light on it’s head and it’s eyes blinking.

We will also need a set of images for moving right (we can then mirror that animation for when the character is moving left – which saves valuable time). Adding to this, images for jumping and for falling are needed so we can program them into the even sheet within the game to give it a more immersive feeling.

– Ryan