ekkof

Planning

What type of game ?

What genre of game ?

What style ?

What is the story ?

Which Software ?

What needed to be done ?

2D

Platformer

Grayscale with hints of color

Sleepy, unphased little boy lost in a colorless world

Unity Engine

Everything, still

When I discussed with my friends the idea of making a game for my graduation project, we started brainstorming about what would be fun to do. I decided that it would be a tiny guy who was in our classroom and who was the size of an eraser. It would be his mission to cross the classroom without being killed by my classmates. I thought about ways in which he could, for example by being stepped on, or that a bug pierced him, another way was someone crushing him with their hands, or with their head when they fell asleep.

BRAINSTORMING

However, after some time spent developing my game, I found that this idea was too difficult to realize with my skill level and that I wouldn't be able to finish it within the given time, so I dropped the idea. Instead I changed the project idea into a man walking through a colorless forest, whose mission it was to find color. The deeper he would go into the cave, the more color there would be but also the more dangerous it would become.

When I had a general idea of what the game looked like in my mind, I still needed to work it out: the main character, the environment, the enemies, everything actually.

DESIGNING/SKETCHING

Once I had decided what the character looked like, I could begin to render it, first in different poses in order to animate them later. I drew the first environment as well.

Just a still image of my character was not enough, I needed to animate them. With little to no experience in animation, this was a challenging task. As I like to figure things out on my own, I didn't watch any tutorials telling me how to animate in Photoshop, I just started making several drawings and I put them one behind the other, which isn't very practical, but I enjoyed doing it.

Idle Animation

Run Animation

Crouch Animation

Crouch Walking Animation

Jump Idle Animation

Jump Moving Animation

As you can see my animations are very inconsistant as the caracter changes in size. That's where my inexperience shows but other than that I'm pretty proud of how my animations came out.

ANIMATING

At this point I could start programming the character, which was the most programming-intensive part. I started with a script that allowed the character to move, from left to right and jump, very simple. When he moved, the right animation had to start, so I did that too. As I had practically no experience in this field, I followed Brackeys' tutorial.

Programming

Once i had decided what the enemies should look like, I could begin to render them and because one environment whas not enough, I began making the next one.

Same thing for the enemies, once the design was done I could animate them.

Idle Animation

Attack Animation

Flying Animation

Here you can see that I have a lot more frames for this enemy than for my main caracter and for the flying enemy below. The reason is that I used a different method to animate, instead of drawing every single frame, I worked with keyframes.

For this enemy I did not make an attack animation because, I got stuck for a long time in the programmation part of the other one and unfortunately I did not have enough time to implement this one in my game.

Cave Environment

Programming

When I said I was stuck on programming the enemy, this meant that I couldn't solve the problem I had for three straight months. My idea for the enemy came to me while I was playing Hollow Knight, which has an enemy that jumps on the character and deals him damage. So I looked for a tutorial on youtube, but at first I couldn't find one, so I tried on my own, which wasn't very realistic. Then I searched some more and I found a tutorial that was perfect except that at the end it didn't work so I watched the whole tutorial again and I couldn't find anything I'd done wrong, so I watched it again and again, reread my code and still nothing. In order not to lose hope in my game, I did something else, that is making the last environment.

And then one day, when I was trying to fix the problem again, I managed to do it by pure accident, I think it was just a name that had been misspelled.

Last ENVIRONMENT

For the last environment I wanted to have fun and I didn't really think about whether or not it would fit with the style of the game. I wanted it to feel a bit magical. Since the first environment was a world without any color I thought it could be interesting that the deeper he went on his quest, the more color there would be but also the more danger.

Since there were enemies, there had to be a way to kill them. During the process, I came up with the idea that my character could kill with his eyes. Because I had made his eyes big and white, it occurred to me that he could use them to shoot lasers. As a result, I had to go through all the steps again, design, animation, programming. But then it wouldn't be fun if he could shoot forever, so I created a usage bar and gave him life so that he could also die, in other words, I created a UI.

PLAY MY GAME

Please try the game if you like. It would mean a lot to me if you would, as I put a lot of time and effort in its development.