Project Description
GAM 602, Game Design Principles; Final Project
This project is so unlike anything else I’ve done! Working in Construct was a mind-trip after spending so much time in Unity and Unreal. The basic premise of this game is that it started out with a few simple platforms to calibrate the character to a set jump height and distance. From there, the first segment of the level was ‘level one’. With each segment, I tried to introduce a new gameplay element that was required in the assignment so that the player isn’t overwhelmed with mastering too many mechanics at once. The second segment of the level was to introduce more enemies, with vertical and horizontal patrol enemies joined by a line-of-sight based enemy. Finally, the third segment of the level was to illustrate power-ups and bullet mechanics; rather than have the player kill the enemies with the gun, I elected to use it as a tool to toggle switches in the level.
I also used the third section as an opportunity to try out some cinematic classics from platformers, such as the horizontal elevator sliding under the character’s feet right as the vertical elevator crests and carrying the player off to the left (and of course, immediately requiring them to jump over an obstacle or be pushed into a pit!)
One of my favorite cool techniques I figured out on this was the checkpoints. Taking advantage of the objects resetting to their start positions whenever the game ends, passing a checkpoint actually just moves the respawn location marker to that spot, rather than assigning a location to a variable or anything like that. Super simple.
