Project #7 Bit-map Game
Description
A lonely astonaut on an alien planet.
Conception
This game is insired by my childhood experience of being a outsider in a
complete foreign culture. Yes, I was lonely, but spending time alone is
not something I hated.
The peace I made with the nature comforted me, hope that this experience
is translated in the game.
Back then, one of my favorite game developer studio is Nitrome and they
produced exclusively pixel games. Hats off to Nitrome!
Sketches and Mechanisms
This game is built on the foundaiton of 2 scenes + 2 still frames and in each scene is occupied with certain amount of characters (define with a class).
Scene 1: The astronaut shows up at a scene occupied with a random amount of aliens figures (called "silo") which, when talked to, response in a incomprehensible dialogue and vanishes afterwards. The primary objective in this scene is simply waiting for the ship to arrive, which takes the astronaut to the next scene.
This fit in with my experience in the way that in the childhood story that I mentioned earlier, I did not speak Enligsh. Being at school means waiting to get picked up by my parents, and they hardly arrive on time. I had to be stuck in the space.
Scene 2: The astronaut lands at a ground where the only object is the sleeping pod. Either the astronaunt can stay up to watch the slow sinking of the sun or can go to bed early, but nothing else.
relating again, to my childhood. There wasn't much to do after going home either, but at least I got to enjoy the freedom of spending a peaceful time with the passage of time.
Reflection
Originally I had more stuff planned for this game, but as I started
coding, the complexity of the project got out of hand. I had to settle
for less due to performance and mechanism issues.
Whilst I was doing research on the coding part, there were some library
that could very much benefit projects like this. Even though I did not
use them in this project, I'll keep them marked for future stuff.
Other than these, the take away here is: structure and plan out the
coding project ahead to avoid ending up a mess.
Sometimes the game crashes and looks like this:
