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.

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.

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.

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.