Month: February 2017

Today we have been experimenting with Construct 2 and we have made a basic demo of part of the first level.

We are using our scene, character and pick-up item and have programmed the game to recognise the character picking up the item, which then triggers a sprite (in this case the locked door) to disappear – note, this sprite is invisible and the idea is that when destroyed it will be replaced by an open door – In this scenario, the open door which spawns is another invisible sprite, just to the right of the door set to ‘solid’ so that we can see it exists and works.

In all, once the images have been compiled it will run as follows:

Player runs into RAM
RAM ‘destroys’ closed door – which in turn spawns open door in place
Player runs into open door to progress.

For the purpose of making sure we choose the best fitting software/platform for our needs we will also be taking a look at Canvas for HTML5 and writing up a post on it shortly.

– Ryan

Adobe Character Animator is a very good piece of software, you can animate from your facial expressions, so when you speak the character on screen also moves his mouth which is very good if you want to animate the character to speak a few lines of sentences. With the press of a few buttons, you can also control the characters’ movements.

However, after going through the tutorial and all its steps I tried to export the footage but you can only export in video format and none that would help our game which is a  big issue in why we can’t use this software. If we can find a way around this problem then we will be sure to use this software to aid our game production.

– Dylan

Recently Dylan and I have tested Unity to see how it would fit in with our project. We found it to be rather difficult and we felt it was quite out of our reach for our timeframe, and thus decided it wasn’t to be the software we will be using.

Unity goes over our heads at this stage as we are completely new to game development so we have set it aside for now but we aim to progress to work with Unity in the future. Maybe if we came up with this idea at the beginning of the year we may have had more time to spend and learn the software but for now we can’t spend too much time learning Unity when we can go for a much simpler approach with similar outcome.

We are going to explore Construct 2 and Canvas for HTML5 to create a more fitting and more optimised 2D game.

– Ryan

Although these designs are basic it has allowed us to get an even better view on how the game will work. For example, if you click start, it goes straight to the game, How to play goes to the screen which gives you all the information and tools to play, settings will allow you to customise the game experience and finally if you click the website, it will take you to the partnering website. Adobe XD has allowed us to get away from the boring old wireframes and allowed us to add interactivity so we can get an even better feel for the whole scope of how the game will run. This is just a basic wireframe which we can change and add to once we know what capabilities we have when making our game.

Today I stumbled across an article written by Gustavo Monforte, lead developer at Fat Panda Games which talked about the 5 lessons he learned while developing their first game – Flat Kingdom.

I think this article can be of some use to us while creating our game. We will be able to see points where professionals went wrong and avoid those mistakes. We will also be able to pick up many tips from the industry. Even if just as a reference guide I think this will be useful.

To view the article, click here.

– Ryan