Main Menu

ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry: 

Communication              Social              Self-management              Research              Thinking

Today I've finished off my main menu. It is a very simple main menu, in which you can choose between quiting the game, changing your settings and, of course, starting the game. The options menu has vast variety of options such as Master, Music and SFX volume, fullscreen and being able to see the controls scheme.

Quitting the game opens up a prompt saying 'Leaving so soon?' to acknowledge that the player should stay and play the game instead of quitting. In the background is some soothing royalty free music and I put together a Title Screen Card of Zed with the name of the game in the corner.

Explanation of the ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry:

Social: While working on the main menu,  I got into a Skype chat with Carl-Fredrik, who gave me some feedback on the menu, saying it looked good, but needed some minor tweaks.

Self-Management: For this part of the project, I had to organize everything so that the options open when you click the options menu, the exit opens the exit prompt and etc.

Thinking: This design came from scratch and I had to think about how I wanted to lay it out.

Character Maps (1st Edition)

ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry: 

Communication              Social              Self-management              Research              Thinking

After some thinking, I've now retextured, and made the first texture for some of my characters. As of now, there are character maps of Zed, Zed as a child, Jun and Mel. I wanted the characters to follow a similar design and thus they are all made up of two colors with a black outline and some shading onto those two colors. The most challenging character I had to make was Jun as he is a dog and hence looked different to my other characters. His walking cycle looks a bit funky, and I might change that later.

Zed                                      Zed (Child)

Jun                                                   Mel


Zed (Profile)


Zed Child (Profile)


Jun (Profile)


Mel (Profile)

Explanation of the ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry:

Social: Because of some lack of creativity, I asked my friends and family for objects that would make a character significant. From asking, I got both the idea of Mel's yellow scarf and Zed's iconic red Newsboy's Hat.

Tiling

ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry: 

Communication              Social              Self-management              Research              Thinking

I have now made my foregrounds and backgrounds tileable, meaning that how far you decide to go in the game, the background and foreground stuff will loop infinitly. This was proven to be a lot easier than what I originally tried to do and place them out by hand to get a long enough level for myself. I found this method of doing such when scrolling through previously mentioned Brackey's 2D platformer tutorial to get any ideas of what to do next. This time most of the credits go to him, as that code was somewhat dated and I had to work around to fix.

Explanation of the ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry:
Research: To figure out what would seem necessary for this game, I looked through the Brackey tutorials to figure out what to do next. Tiling seemed to be something that could've been really useful for my game, so I decided on implementing it.

Thinking: I had to rewrite the Brackey code as it was dated, meaning that I had to think about possible solutions.

Parallaxing!

ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry: 

Communication              Social              Self-management              Research              Thinking

After that setback, I have now gotten back to where I was and done something called parallaxing. Parallaxing is a mechanic used in many modern 2D platformers of today and is used to make the game feel like it has more depth. To do this, I had to follow a tutorial by Brackeys, a danish game development course on YouTube. The tutor, Asbjørn Thirslund, has an entire course focusing on 2D platform game development which I might refer to in the future. All credits for the script I've written goes to him, as I understood it, but couldn't have written it by myself.

Explanation of the ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry:
Research: As I knew what parallaxing was, but not how to program it, I had to look up a tutorial on how to do it. In such sense, I had to research to find out how to program the parallaxing for my background.

Unfortunate Events

Whilst working on a new feature for my game, my project files got corrupt. I have no idea how this happened and I tried reloading a back-up I made. Unfortunately those files are corrupt too, and looking at it, it was the Engine that broke it. I was forced to redownload the engine and load up the project again. But for some reason the project had been cleaned of my hard drive. I have now been forced to remake my game, meaning that it won't be a fully finished product, but a prototype or maybe half a game.

Research Part 1

ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry: 

Communication              Social              Self-management              Research              Thinking

After my meeting with Anna, I got a few suggestions for websites, articles and books that I could use for my research. One of the books was a childrens book on how to write stories, which wasn't of great help to me, as everything in it was basic knowledge I already had. I also got an article on why video game stories suck, which was of some help to me, as it tells me what not to do when writing my story. I also did some research by playing some story driven games, such as The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game and The Last of Us. There is no certain reason I picked those games, except for them both having great stories. I also went ahead and sent out a survey to my class to see what they had to say about the stories in games. I got some interesting results and I think this will be great information for my game.

Explanation of ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry:
Social: I've talked to Anna, who gave me great research tips and tricks that I used for my research. I also sent out a survey to the class to see what they had to say about video game stories.

Research: As I've read a lot of texts explaining video game stories or stories in general, I've started to build up some information I will use to improve my story.

Script for Zed finished (ROUGH).

ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry: 

Communication              Social              Self-management              Research              Thinking

As of today, a rough draft of the game's script is done. The game will have 4 chapters with 16 cutscenes between at the moment. As this is only a draft, I will come back to this and rewrite it now and again to achieve a state in which the player can really be emotionally attached to the story and characters. Below is a picture showing how the first cutscene will play out in the game

Explanation of the ATL Skills I've addressed in this entry:
Communication: I have been writing a story that should communicate with the player and make them feel emotions. I have been showing my thoughts and put it all on paper.

Thinking: I have thought about the story for a long time and put it on paper. I have also been thinking about how I could make the story more intriguing and emotional.