2D Game Project: Things I have learned in the process
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The end is nigh
Final week, final blog for this project. As I have stated previously the game will not really be finished. It will work but it will not really be a game. No objectives will have been implemented and the levels after the first one have practically not been worked on at all. But it is all to be expected from the first game me and my fellows. I worried that we would overscope so from the beginning I tried to limit the production. Apparently we overscoped anyway. Much because of poor planning on our part. But again it is hard to know all the factors when it is something that we never have done before and something tells me that it will continue to be hard throughout our career. There are so many things to take into consideration, the skill level of the team, the amount of people who work on a project, their ability to work together and their level of ambition. I have learned a great deal of things from working on this project. Mostly things about myself that I have never thought about before and things about planning and overall designing games. I know that I will make a better job the next time than what I have done now and the experiences from that project will carry over to the next and so on and so forth. Regarding things I have learned about actual game design, feedback is important. The more you have, feedback appropriate for your game that is, the better. Subtle things like muzzle flash, camera shake, sound effects and many more things can really lift your game. Speaking of sound, this is something that I feel like I need to learn more about. I know that when you are making amateur movies, it is better to have good audio than good picture. I think that this is true for games as well. Audio feedback. I will get on that as soon as I have a moment to spare.
Moving on. No blog is complete without an artifact from the game. This will tie into things that I have learned. When making spritesheets, take a look at them before they are implemented into the game.
Our game is made up from tiles on a sprite sheet using coordinates from that sprite sheet to place the in the game world. For awhile we noticed that there is tearing between the tiles and this was thought to be some kind of glitch from the code. My theory is much simpler, it is because the spritesheet has pink lines between every sprite that show through inside the game world. Why this happened I cannot say but I know that it is there as seen in the picture. Look especially in the white areas.
The solution would be to just generate a new sprite sheet but the way out game is build this does not work because all of the coordinates would be wrong and have to be done again from the beginning. So remember to check your assets before basing a great deal of your game on them.
This is all for me this time  |
