GDD200 Final Project: Rollin' The Ball

For our final project for GDD200, I expanded upon the original tutorial of the Roll-A-Ball package in Unity, with the intention of making a full game out of it. As far as the overall design intentions go, the object of the game is to progress through each of the three levels, collecting cubes as you go. When you have collected all of the cubes in a given level, you will be told that you are advancing, and the next level will load. The first level is a simple room, and serves as a tutorial. The second level has three stories, and introduces momentum. The final level is one that requires more control and mastery of momentum overall. This allows for a scaling difficulty curve that isn't too harsh. 

Textures used were a simple black and gray rocky theme for the walls and floors, contrasted by bright neon colors for the player's ball and the cube collectibles. This stark contrast helps to illuminate what is actually important in the game.

LEVEL 1: The tutorial level is relatively straightforward, as the controls and ball count are displayed on the screen. The box-like structure with enclosed walls allows for the player to get used to the controls without having to deal with falling off any edges. By collecting all of the cubes, they will advance.

LEVEL 2: This level starts you off at a distant angle, and you can see a close-up of a cube. By putting two and two together, the player will realize that that cube is on a raised platform on another level. Ramps are used to get from one floor to the next, and any other area will be blocked off. The trick to getting to that raised platform lies in your momentum going up the last ramp. Because the wall off of that ramp is a bouncy material, you can run up to the wall and the ball will ricochet off into the distance. By controlling your mid-air direction, you will be able to reach the upper platform with the last cubes.

LEVEL 3: This level starts you off in a camera similar to the first level, but this time the level is based on forward movement, rather than platforming. If a player tries to initially roll of the front edge, they will realize that the next platform is off in the distance. They need to get a good head start if they want to build up enough speed to reach it. There are two things to note when collecting all of the cubes to complete this level, and as a result, the game: there are not walls at every point, and you can't go back to an area afrter moving past. This means that you have to be careful when building up speed, as you can go flying off into the distance. In addition, you have to collect all of the balls in a section before moving on, or else you won't be able to grab them again.

Link to the game: http://www.kongregate.com/games/johnhattonmiller/rollin-the-ball

Wk 06 2D RPG Final Product

The final version of my 2D RPG is complete! Using a series of screen shots, i will walk through how the story progresses.

Wk05 Progress Update

Wk04

Wk 03

Wk02 Texture Changes

As i started to play the 2D RPG, i decided what I'm going to do for my assets. Im going for a bright color scheme, as I really enjoy contrasting a variety of colors together to really make everything clearly defined and interesting.

The main character is a portrayal of myself, because it's fun to make it so that I am the one


doing everything throughout the game, and adds an element of immersion to the story. The main thing i changed for the buildings is that i introduced a bright contrast between the walls and the floor. I used a magenta for the floor and a bright yellow for the walls, to give a vibrant look to all the rooms.

The weapons were s lot of fun to mess around with. I turned the original sword into an anchor, using the anchor pixelart image that i made back in GDD110 last semester. The bow remained unchanged, although i did make the arrows slightly bigger, and gave them a little purple flair at the end. I didn't like how the wand looked, so i actually made it an extension of my arm, and turned the magic blob into a speeding fireball. These changes were made to reflect my own interests, as I dont care too much about bows, and i love magic and melee attacks.

 

This is a redesign of the pink blob enemy from the original starter kit. I want to give each of the three basic enemies a theme of each one having a specific color. So, This blob will have the color of green. I also gave it eyes, to make it more cute!

Wk 01 2D RPG Review

The 2D RPG starter kit is a fun introduction to how games of this type work. That being said, this game could use a lot of improvements that would help to make it much more enjoyable and fluent of an experience.

One thing that would be very helpful to improving the game overall is very simple: make the scrolling of the text faster. One thing that severely breaks immersion is feeling that you're waiting forever for the text to load on the screen. Having auto scroll or faster text speed would remedy this.

Another thing that could help this would be to add diversity to the types of arrows. Having a bow is great, but in an RPG, it would be interesting to have a magical aspect to the bow. Arrows could shoot out fire, ice, poison, or even electricity. These special, higher damage-dealing arrow types could also trigger creativity for enemy types. There could be red monsters that are immune to fire, light blue monsters immune to ice, and so on. It would engage the player to try new things, and also force them to not just have dominant strategy, as you need to keep switching weapons up in certain areas.

Finally, character customization is a staple in many RPG's in this day and age. With this cute, cartoony art style, there is easily more incentive to want to characterize your person. Being able to change up the shirt, hair, eye and skin color of your character is a fun thing that adds a little bit of one's personality into the game, furthering the sense of immersion. You could also take a note from Starbound, a 2D RPG where you can choose 6 different races, each of which has their own unique flair, such as avian, robotic, human, and so on.

Overall, variety and fluency are the two main problems with the game, and the above suggestions should remedy that.