Author Archives: Jakilutra

About Jakilutra

Competitive Pokémon player, prolific tournament organizer and community founder—on the Pokemon Showdown battle simulator. Also a keen Nintendo completionist.

Digital Arts Foundation—Final Project: Week 4 (Pre-Production)

For this week, our lecturer tasked us with summarising our pre-production by producing a milestone video. I thought about what I wanted to show: my plan document and the flowcharts. I also wanted to talk about the languages I explored in Week 2 and also my inspirations. I came up with the following document:

Figure 1: Finalized Plan of Final Project

It outlines my inspirations, as well as the game mechanics. I neglected to mention the blue/red/green rank concept was inspired by Mario Bros. , the arcade game featuring Mario and Luigi, where they bump enemies from below, and the spin-off of the Donkey Kong arcade game.

I’m big into Pokemon and I’ve played a battle mod where your inherit other abilities from the previous Pokemon you sent out. This led me to adapt the brief to something incorporating inheritance. I settled for gaining abilities of defeated enemies. As mentioned, I was also interested in getting past walls that you wouldn’t normally be able to get past, which features in many 2D games, including Mighty Switch Force and Mutant Mudds. The brief also strongly reminded me of The Legend Zelda on the NES.

Along with this document, I also wanted to present the flowcharts that I’d produced on Lucid Chart and link to an article that showed the benefit of making a 2D game on Unity as opposed to Unreal Engine. I found a comparison article here.

My final page of flow charts looked like this:

Figure 2: Page of Flow Charts

Once I had all these elements in place, I recorded my screen and did a commentary on my pre-production. I wrote a quick script that I could read from, and kept re-recording until I produced something of 2 minutes length, as per requirements, and that I was also happy with.

Figure 3: Pre-Production Milestone video

I realized after I forgot to make a proper theme and name for the game, and also summarise what the game was about. I was happy otherwise.

That concludes this week. Next week I will describe my exploration on Unity and start of my game, which will come under the first week of production.

Digital Arts Foundation—Final Project: Week 3 (Pre-Production)

For week 3, I mind-mapped my project with flowcharts, making pseudo-code that will help me once I enter production. I started out by describing the start of the game, the damage received, and the game over / restart sequence.

Figure 1: Game Start and Player Damaged on Lucid Chart (2023).

Next, I thought about all the key variables that I thought would need to be accessed in the game events to make the game flow. For instance, I planned three different types of enemies, and depending on the type, they were to be weaker or stronger; but at the same time, sharing the basic characteristics of an enemy. The variables indicate what specific code is needed execute to generate the desired differences in strength.

Figure 2: Enemy Variables on Lucid Chart (2023)

The final stage of making the flow charts was to add the events in the game. For example, I presented some approximate logic for player movement, such as changing the orientation of the player sprite, and also how the player interacted with walls. Other events included player and enemy attacking, and the points gained when defeating enemies.

Figure 3: Player Movement Function on Lucid Chart (2023)

That concludes week 3. Week 4 will look at the penultimate stage of pre-production, summarising my planning before exploring Unity in Week 5.

Digital Arts Foundation—Final Project: Week 2 (Pre-Production)

For my project in week 2, I looked into C++, which is used in Unreal Engine. I mainly went through the C++ section on W3Schools and completed the exercises where you have to complete the missing input. I found the cin and cout (C-input and C-output) concepts intriguing, as well as reference and pointer variables. I’d not come across anything similar in JavaScript, my main coding language, which I actually only script in, rather than program.

Figure 1: C++ Introduction Exercises (W3Schools 2023)

I also looked at the more complicated part, how C++ is used in conjunction with Unreal Engine. It certainly looked more intimidating, because of having to learn about its templates, its way of doing things.

Figure 2: Programming Quick Start Tutorial for Unreal Engine (Epic Games 2023)

I then went on to look at C# very briefly on W3Schools, the language used in Unity.

Figure 3: C# Tutorial (W3Schools 2023)

I found the syntax comfortable (and C++’s too), so I came to the conclusion I’d be comfortable working with either engine regardless of the language.

Due to my experience last semester and even before on gaming news websites, I knew that Unity was deemed the more natural choice for a 2D game, so I decided I would choose Unity and work with C#.

That concludes Week 2. In the next week, I will look at creating flowcharts to mind map all my code before using Unity.

Digital Arts Foundation—Final Project: Week 1 (Pre-Production)

Hi, my name is Jack Ralls.

I’m learning computer games programming in Solent University. I will be making a development log of my ‘final’ game project in the foundation year, which will detail my journey from pre-production to post-production.

In the 1st week, we were given a brief by our Lecturer. We were to make a 2D top-down hack ‘n slash computer game. The following were our requirements:

Figure 1: Final Project Brief (Solent University 2023).

I thought these requirements were a bit ambitious for a first game, but nevertheless I took on the challenge and came up with the following plan (between the first week and second week):

Level

2D-Top-Down with camera tracking the player and scrollable in every 2D direction.

Single level with a few different areas to explore some basic combinations.

Health

3 ranks of enemy: blue have 3 HP, red have 2 HP and green have 1 HP.
The player has 3 HP.

Attacks

The player has two attacks:

  1. A strong attack that deals 2 damage and activates twice as fast as the weaker one, but the player can’t move or attack following the activation/usage for a second.
  2. A weak attack that deals 1 damage with no recovery time.

The green enemy uses weak attacks.
The red enemy uses blocks and weak attacks.
The blue enemy uses blocks and strong attacks.

Movement (Translation) Speed

Player moves faster than the enemies, enemies move different speeds according to rank.

Abilities

There are 2 different types of enemy: one type can walk through walls of their colour and the other type can teleport to squares of their colour.
The player inherits their abilities by defeating them (reducing them to 0 or negative HP) and you can hold multiple abilities.
The player will able to swap between green, red and blue costumes with a key, which will tell the player which colour wall they can walk through or colour square they can teleport to.
There will be a teleport key and only one teleport square of each colour at most within the area surrounding the player, so there’s no ambiguity about which square they teleport to.
There will be icons to show that the player has acquired the ability to walk through walls or teleport.

The player has a default ability to hide (become translucent, stay in the same place, but not interact with enemies).

AI

???

Points

The Player receives 6 points for defeating a blue enemy, 3 points for defeating a red enemy and 1 point for defeating a green enemy.
If the player defeats all coloured enemies of one type, they gain 10 bonus points. If they defeat all coloured enemies of both types, they gain an additional 10 bonus points. (up to 30 bonus points)

I felt more motivated once I came up with my plan, but I recognized I had barely any programming experience in a gaming engine.

That concluded the first week. In the next week, I will continue to describe what I did in my pre-production.

Pokémon Legends Arceus: Progress #3: First 999 Research Task

Today I got my first 999 in a research task: Shadow Claw usage for Giratina.

I’ve now got 200 (24 to go) alpha species and 287 (36 to go) alpha forms; 78 shiny species and 89 shiny forms; 3 of my shinies are exclusively alpha, another I have in alpha and non-alpha.

62 of my entries are now perfected. I’m still on 35 paths of solitude completed. 19 of my species and 28 of my forms have a specimen maxed out.

If the lost and found record stats cap out easily, that will be my next post, else Giratina all 999ed, all alphas or perfect dex will be my next post.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus Progress #2: Max Research Points


Today, after 314:16 hours (pi hundred hours), I finally reached 99,999 research points. I have completed 100K’s worth of research tasks now out of 125.2K research points available, so I’m about 80% of the way through getting a perfect pokédex.

I have 190 species and 275 forms alpha; and 67 species and 75 forms shiny (legendary shinies are imported). 2 of my shinies are exclusively alpha, while another is caught both non-alpha and alpha.

54 out of 242 of my entries are perfect: all legendary/mythical. I’ve completed 35 of the paths of solitude and have 16 species and 24 forms with a specimen maxed out (level 100 and 10/10/10/10/10/10 effort levels).

The next post for this game will probably be either getting a perfect dex or collecting every alpha. See you then.

Pokémon Go Progress #9: Level 47!

After raiding lots for the legendaries birds, I’ve finally reached Level 47. As predicted, I have 100+ candy for every Pokémon line that I’ve obtained. I have a total of 40 hundos now, including Shundo Kyogre.

My missing 3* counts are: Kanto: 6; Johto: 29; Hoenn: 11; Sinnoh: 42; Unova: 28; Kalos: 67. Still haven’t worked out Alola or Galar yet.

I guess I’ll use some of my spare candy for XL candy now, as well as going for 1000+ candy next in each Pokémon.

Pokémon Legends Arceus Progress #1: Pokédex & All Mission & Requests Completion

242 Entries Research Level 10

Yesterday, after nearly 140 hours played, I finally completed my Pokédex on Legends: Arceus and received the Shiny charm! About 3 days ago, I finally completed every request also, after a lot of grinding for the Path of Solitude. I did some other Paths of Solitude and I’m now up to 26 out of 242. As for Perfect entries on the Pokédex, I’m only at 7 out of 242, but I’ll probably increase that as I alpha and Shiny hunt more.

I have collected one of each non-alpha-and-non-shiny form available in the game and transferred over an extra Alolan Vulpix so I could have both Alolan Vulpix and Alolan Ninetales. You only get one out of Alolan Vulpix or Alolan Ninetales, and only one each of every Legendary and Mythical Pokémon, which means I’m missing 26 extra legendary and mythical formes. It’s hard to see how I will get every Arceus form on the game, but the rest don’t seem too difficult other than Enamorus, which is currently Legends: Arceus exclusive.

For alphas, I have 197 out of 322 forms. For Shinies, I have 18 out of 690 (with 2 unavailable shinies transferred in) so far. I have about 7 Level 100 Pokémon, 2 of which have maxed out effort levels: Arceus and Darkrai. It will be interesting to see these numbers go up over time if I continue to play this game.

I have also 65, 270 Research points out of a possible 99, 999. I expect the next update will be when I reach this maximum.

Pokémon Go Progress #8: Level 46!

After raiding lots the past week, I finally got enough XP to reach Level 46. I’ve now got 100+ candy in every Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh Pokémon. I expect by level 47, I’ll have 100+ in all Pokémon.

I have 31 hundos now, and my 3* missing counts with Hisuian forms added are: Kanto: 8; Johto: 30; Hoenn: 14; Sinnoh: 44; Unova: 31; Kalos: 67. I haven’t worked out Alola and Galar yet.

Pokémon Go Progress #7: Level 45!

After 4 long months, I finally defeated 50 GO Rocket leaders to progress me to the next level. I have nearly 4 million XP towards Level 46.

At the moment, with my spare rare candy, I’m trying to get 100+ candy in every Pokémon line. I’ve done so with all Kanto and Johto Pokémon, and am now working towards finishing off with Hoenn.

I have 24 hundos now and my missing 3* counts are now: Kanto: 6; Johto: 31; Hoenn: 18; Sinnoh: 48; Unova: 31.