Description and reflection

I really struggled with this assignment, especially so close to 7-in-7. I struggled to think of anything about myself that I wanted to make into a game. Making content about myself, or my past is incredibly hard for me. I came up with several different ideas- a non functional drawing game, a color curve drawing game, a simple dino-jump game, an rpg-style walking game with random environments. None of them really ‘fit’. I ran into a huge glitch with my audio using p5play and tried coding collision myself, which failed. My point is, it was a struggle. Eventually I had to go back to basics. I ended up making my project about crunch, and distracting myself from bugs in my code by pivoting to making 2d assets when possible. Here’s my flowchart for the game

The concept of the game was to create a simple, cute game about trying your best, Even though you can’t win.

Workflow and Asset notes

I made a simple bunny sprite, as lately I’ve taken to drawing myself as a bunny when I’m tired. I also wanted to make the game as ‘cute’ as possible. This made it a lot harder to be angry at it when it wasn’t working. I used aseprite to make my pixelated sprites, focusing on pastel colors. Below are some examples of my sprites:

BUNNY

The bunny wears comfy, black clothes like I often do. I made her head pretty big but and her are eyes evenly spaced and wide apart to give her an extra cuteness factor. I do think if I go back to this project in the future, I'd make her dark sweater a lot lighter, so the details are easy to see,

LAPTOP

I used blend modes to give the screen a glowing effect, this would have been better if I had managed to code the blend modes ints p5js at the edges, rather than having the glow extend beyond the object. However, I knew that would lead to me wanting to animate the glow, blur it, etc, so I opted for a single image.

BOOK

it’s a simple book sprite. I used a pastel placeholder image that I really liked. I had planned to replace it with an image that I worked on, however when I loaded my own placeholder the load time of the game increased drastically. I’m still not sure why this is, seeing as the specs for each image were the same in the versions I used. I chose to use a pastel pink background instead of my placeholder for now. If I have more time later on, I’d love to go back and draw some cute pixelated backgrounds and see if they work.

Background

I made this image as the background image for the start and end screens, however including it made the game lag so it hasn't been included in the final game.