(PP3) Mystery Box Game Instructions and Reflection
Posted: October 15, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »By Kenny Olson
objective:
You are the white cube (bottom left corner). Shift and dodge away from the color changing bad guy (top right corner), who is protecting the color changing rainbow gold. You have three lives to collect as much rainbow gold as possible. As you steal more and more rainbow gold the bad guy will get more and more upset. The bad guy will do whatever it takes to protect and hide the rainbow gold. How much gold can you steal, and how long can you last!?!?!
Instructions:
- Plug the “Mystery Box” (Makey Makey) into the computer. Plug the Leap Motion into the computer. At this time do not touch the box until the “game starts” (If you don’t have the “leap motion” or the “Mystery Box”, the game can still be played, and you may skip this first step.)
- Download and open the Mystery Box zip file and open the Isadora File found within. Then immediately open the Isadora preview window full screen. hot key: (command + sift + S)
- A pink and blue loading bar will appear, the game is loading, wait till loading bar fills and the main title will appear.
- The main title will play music (adjust volume accordingly). Text will then flash saying “swipe hand to start” (swipe hand over the leap motion) to start playing. (If you don’t have the leap motion you may press the space bar or the zero key on the keyboard.)
- The main title and music will fade away and the game will start.
- To play the game. Pick up the “Mystery Box” and try touching random sides of the box together with your hands to move the white cube (found in the bottom corner at the start of the game). (The keyboard may also be used to move the white box around by using the arrow keys.) The smaller blinking box is the “rainbow gold” (meant to be collected). The colored box moving towards the white box (found in the top right corner at the start of the game) is the “bad guy” (say away form it).
- When you loose all three of your lives the game will end and present your final score. You will then be redirected to the main title screen. (jump back to step four.)
NOTE:
To achieve the best playing experience adjust your Isadora screen preview window ratio to 1920 by 1080.
Game Download:
Reflection:
I started this project in hopes to make a NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) look alike game, with an 80s/90s retro vibe. I referenced a lot of game systems to understand what kids of game I wanted to make. Gauntlet was one game that stood out the most. Gauntlet is a top down, roguelike, dungeon crawl type game. The game itself is never ending, however, gets progressively harder the farther the players get into the game. In the game players collect gold, potions, and food while trying to find the exit to the next level. While doing so there are different types of non playable “bad guys” who try to kill or harm the “good guys”.
In my game I wanted to try and recreate as much of the Gauntlet game system as I could. After talking with Alex I quickly understood how to allow players to control a characters movement around the screen. Alex said to think of the playing area like a grid and the character is jumping/moving from grid box to grid box. to get the character to move I used keyboard watcher actor (tied to the arrow keys) triggering a counter actor. The counter actor incrementally increased and decreased the horizontal and vertical values of the character (which in my game was a colored square made from a shapes actor) so when the arrow keys were pressed the character could move. For the bad guy I used the same system as for the good guy, however, the bad guy needs to both move on its own and chase/follow the good guy. I did this with a comparator actor, I took the horizontal and vertical values of the good guy and the horizontal and vertical values of the bad guy and fed both the horizontal values into one comparator actor and both vertical values into their own comparator actor. I then set each comparator actor to trigger the bad guy to move if the bad guys horizontal and vertical values are not equal to the good guys values. Not included in the Gauntlet game was a life counter/display. In the game I made, I gave the player three lives/chances to be killed before the game would reset from the start. Inside Isadora the code looks more complicated than what is happening. Basically, what is happening is if the horizontal and vertical values from the good and bad guy are the same, one of the three shapes actors (displayed in the top left of the active game window at the start of each game signifying three lives) is turned off. After this event happens a third time, a jump actor is triggered and sends the player to a “GAME OVER SCREEN” with the players score displayed, then sending the player back to the title screen. The game then resets. In Gauntlet, players collect items in the game (like gold and food) and exit each level by standing over an exit door. In my game, A character is tasked with collecting a small flashing cube (I called rainbow gold, because it changes colors) the when the character lands on a rainbow gold square several things happen. First, the players score increases by “100”. Two, the stage, obstacles, the bad guy, and the rainbow gold all changes colors (signifying a change in level). Third, the rainbow gold “randomly” changes its position to a new spot in the playing. As the player accumulates points by collecting “rainbow gold” the score increases and when the score increases several things happen. First, for every 1,000 points added to the score the bad guy moves faster (up until 10,000 points). Second, As the score gets higher several different sized squares appear over the playing area, and block the players view. The game still functions as usual, however, when the rainbow gold appears behind the “view blocking” square area, the player needs to then search with these areas to find the gold. When the bad guy or good guy enter these areas they also become obscured from view. This adds a much needed tension and strategie to the game play.
The most challenging aspect of this game to create was the character movement system (as explained prior). The system I created worked great (after exploring and testing several different systems before), however, the system I ended with could not function with negative numbers. This meant I had to manually shift the origin of the projector actor from the center of the preview screen, to the bottom left corner of the preview screen. (As shown below) the origin is the (0,0) usually found in the center of a projector actor preview window in Isadora. To insure all the characters would always land on a set of positive coordinates I had to physically zoom into the top right area of the screen . By doing this I ran into some scaling problems and gained some granularity with the objects that needed to interact with the grid (so the good guy and bad guy square shapes actors, the rainbow gold square shapes actor, the grid image I used in the background, and the view obscuring squares also made from the shapes actor). I overcame the fuzzy and granular look by adding more noise grain to the overall composition to help unify and make everything feel purposeful.
In the end the overall game works great, but there are some small glitches that happen from time to time. One glitch is the game will start the player off with two lives instead of three, even though the three squares (representing the player having three lives) in the top left of the screen are visible, under the hood, the code shows the player has already lost a life. Another glitch is sometimes the bad guy could take a life away from the good guy by only being on one of the same horizontal or vertical access as the good guy, this would also cause the bad guy to move around the screen in an odd way. Most of the glitches happen after the game ends (for whatever reason) the game does not fully reset when a new game starts.
If I were to continue with this game I would like to add more bad guys over time, a way for the player to gain an extra life, possibly grow and shrink the playing grid area, A scoreboard with player names. I also think adding a character selection screen would be interesting, the player could choose between different shapes to play as, and each shape has different abilities.
Using Isadora as a video game development software for RPGs is probably not something the developers meant for Isadora to be used as, and it shows. Regardless this was A fun experiment.