APD Week 2 - Play and Objects - HH21

By Harry Hughes

Finally, I’m at a point in the semester where I’m finding a bit of clarity and a clearer path. I’ve decided I’m going to use APD to create a new Unity game every week that’s related to the theme. I have a tendency to want to work on one big game at a time, which is what I did last semester, and I think making a completely new project from scratch in APD each week will be a really good way to shake up my skills.

Once again, sort of trusting my intuition, I had a lightning bolt idea while watching the APD lecture of a game where clicking on an object causes it to increase in size, but if the object gets too big it will burst. This was where I started and through making it I came to change and develop different elements until it became the game it is now, a 2 player game.

Context

This is a button-masher desktop game. Again, I really just wanted this game to be a very bare-bones affair, as long as it actually works and actually is fun. I didn’t want to waste any time on superficial elements like audio, colour, fonts. In its final form, the game asks two players to compete against each other to increase the size of their objects to the correct size (52, my lucky number). The trick is that each player can increase or decrease their sizes by amounts within a random range (Player 1 can increase size by between 0 and 15, and decrease it by between 0 and 8. Player 2 can increase size by between 0 and 8 and decrease it by between 0 and 12.) So it’s really a sort of race.

Method

I made this game in Unity 3D. The initial plan was to make a game where you had to make an object increase in size to the biggest size it could be before it hits a trigger and bursts. The trick would be that the trigger randomly spawns at a different location each time so the player wouldn’t really know how how big they could go and would be taking a risk every time they increase the size. This sort of reminded me of a game that used to get played on the radio: an anonymous voice would read increasingly higher sums of money, and the player would have to say “stop the clock” (or words to that effect) before there was an explosion (sound effect). If you stop the clock before the explosion, you win that amount, but if you hear the explosion you get nothing. I decided this idea would only work if players’ scores could be recorded in a database somewhere. I thought about just getting players to email me a screenshot of their final score too, but then I also couldn’t figure out how to get the trigger to spawn at a different location (within a defined space). So then I changed the idea slightly, to make it so the player had to get the length to be exactly 52- difficult when you are increasing and decreasing by a random amount- and that if their length becomes greater than 58, they lose. I did actually finish this game, but quickly decided it could be improved! I added a second player who had slightly different parameters to their controls (they can increase by between 0 and 8, and decrease by between 0 and 12). There is no option for increasing too much anymore, it’s just a race to 52.

Response

I am still waiting for feedback from people! I got my mum to play the 1 player version and I was very proud that she could make sense of it (though it lead to all sorts of questions about how I could get a job “inventing games” for Nintendo).

Reflection

For what it is, I would say this is just about perfect. There is an improvement I have thought to make where players can only take one turn at a time before the other player goes, but I’m enjoying it just being a button-masher for now.

I said from the start that I wanted this to be almost aesthetic-less, as long as it works and is fun. While I’m most excited in games about superficial elements, this game is almost all code. I programmed about six different C# scripts to do different things including key inputs, random-range size alterations and displaying calculations as UI elements. Slowly but surely I feel more like I can speak more fluently in Unity, and make the sorts of projects I want to make.

2-player game: https://harry-hughes-rmit.itch.io/object-2-player

1- player game: https://harry-hughes-rmit.itch.io/object-game