APD - Week 1【Shadow Jumper】

Note: the viedo is perfect play video, recommend to play yourself before watch it.

Theme: Play and self

Context:

A simple 2D Single-Player Platform puzzle solving game. When I think about the theme "play and self", the first thing came into my mind was "play with yourself", and it automaticallu changed into Help yourself during playing, but I thought it's hard to show the theme self because human is selfish, anything that anyone does is acctually for itself, I have to made the game different to show the point self. then the idea of help yourself in the future came into my mind, if you what is helping you is you in the past, it will show the keyword self clearly. That lead me to created this game. 

The next step was "how to help your self in the future?". The simplest way I thought firstly was jump on yourself's head, that idea was from Life Goes On. It is a single-player 2D platform puzzle solving game, it's main idea is use your corpses to help you clear the levels, especially step on your corpse to jump higher. I thought it is similar to my idea. But is still different because yourself in the past can move, so it is more like two-player coopreate game, where player 1 is yourself, and player 2 is yourself in the past. there are lots of them like Unravel 2, where players need to help each other to get over levels. By mix those ideas together, I finally decided what my game should be looks like.

Method:

Unity 2019.2.0f1

Response: 

I tried to record all the actions the player made by time but it was hard. Then I realized I can record by frame count which is integer, then use this as index of the array to set and get the actions efficiently. After finishing the game system, I spend most of time to creat the level and play test. The position of  every piece of blocks should be accurate to make sure the only way to pass it is what I designed. It pretty fun during continously finding out "Oh shit, I can jump over this block that way, that's not good".

 Finally I just finished one level because the limitation of time. I can clear the level in about 1 minute, but I think it is hard enough for a new player to spend more than 10 minutes.

Reflection:

My goal of creating games is always create fun games whatever the theme is. It somtimes made me created an fun game but not fit the theme. This time I spend much more time on thinking about how to make a fun game that fit the theme well. I think I did well this time but still, the game is too short. I need to speed up the developing next time to save more time on designing the game.

Game Introduction:

Every time you press R, positions of you and your shadow will be reset, and your shadow will copy all the actions you did before you press R (actually is between the last two times you press R, Which means you will overwrite last record by press R again)

You need to get over the level (I only made 1 level) by cooprate with your shadow.

Key Binding:

Press A and D to move

Press W to jump

Press R to reset you and your shadow to the highlighting save point

Press Left and Right Arrows to see further

Press Esc to quit the game

Note:

1. Every time you activated a new save point, the shadow won't move at the next time you press R. 
2. Nothing have friction, you will fall down if you stand on your shadow when it is running. you need to run with it to keep standing on it head. Same as the moving platform.

Tips:

1. You can press R two times to make your shadow stand still (record nothing, therefore do nothing),  then it won't disturb you when you try to record a long series of actions.
2. Both you and your shadow can activate the save point and final goal.
3. The grey one is the shadow, you are in orange! 

Downloads:

Download File: 1583739877_shadowjumper-project.zip
Download File: 1583739884_shadowjumper-built.zip