Platformer

Inspiration:

In our first inspiration, we were planning to make an adventure gameplay. After we did the prototype of the first idea, we think it is kinda simple and bored. Therefore, Zhijun said she want to combine the concept of escaping room game into the platformer game. An escape room, also known as an escape game, is a game in which a team of players cooperatively discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to progress and accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time. 

Prototype:

Based on the research we did online, we started to draw our prototype. We actually want this game to be smooth and not horror, so our UI style is not sharp but cute and smooth like this:

Process:

Our story is a little girl has been locked in the house, and she wanted to escape the room, so we set some of the items in the house that can be collected, such as flowers to  keys, so we started to set up things inside the house that could be picked up, like flowers and keys. The flowers are used to make medicine, the required materials can be seen in the menu on the wall, which will be the prompt to pass the first level, the key is used to open the chest (sometimes the chest may not have anything or even it may be just a cover). Most things in the room can be moved, open, so that the player could collect it if it has item, or even turn into a hidden stage. 

Playtesting Feedback:

From last week's playtesting Feedback, users are willing to see different effects, stages and interactions in our games, since our first demo of this game is very simple and it only can collect keys, flowers, but does nothing, so after the playtesting, we added a lot of interaction stuffs in our second development. 

Game Scenes:

Postmortem Devlog:

Success:

In our project, we actually succeed in collecting items and consume this item to unlock another item. We also successfully solved the Renderer problem, because this is the first time we've used the Renderer feature. I think it can replace the motion function to some extent, which is a very good choice for users who don't know much about motion function. In addition, we also successfully realized the interaction of the characters, although the process was a little difficult, we still tried our best to present it. The mechanics of the whole game were not that different from what we had expected, and we were quite satisfied.

Failure:

Where we failed is that we set many functions in our expected plan due to the limited time. However, due to the limited time, we could only include them in our development link for our future update. In terms of details, the failure that impressed me most was in writing the recipe code, the function of this part didn't work as we originally planned, we tried several different ways to solve it, although all failed in the end, we chose a relatively simple mouse click to solve the problem. Another failure is we did not focusing on animation too much in this project since  we spend more time focusing on the coding part more than the animation part. 

Lessons Learned:

Personal speaking, I am tended to design 2D platformer game more than a 3D game, since I think 2D platformer games are classic and impressive to me. Hence, I really happy that I can design a 2D platformer game in this class. Although, there are a lot of stuffs  that  I need to learn, to improve, I still hope that I could make more 2D platformer game in the future, and especially some adventure 2D platformer games. For instance, "the Mega-man" :), I love the shooting and beating system in 2D platformer. The most exciting thing in this project that I learned was about the sprite renderer function, it is really useful and easy. 

Future Development:

More in the future, I will have a game mechanism, because the chamber of secrets escape game itself the biggest feature is the uncertainty and detail, so in the future if I want to continue improving the playability of the game, I will be doing more on the game mechanism and the details of promotion, even into some of the new mechanism, for example, trigger hidden levels, switching scenarios, even there will be a fight scene this game mechanism, so as to improve the fun of the game and diversity.