My game of Shape Man

Morten Holland

Games Design L3

Teacher: Wayne Gallear

My Game of Shape Man

Rules:

You start as a circle in the middle. The enemies will rotate between each shape and you can only kill a shape if you look the same as it. To change shape, you must touch the shapes in the corners of the room. There is also collectibles which increase your score.

Controls: ARROW KEYS to move

Bugs
There is only 2 bugs in my game, but one of them is pretty game breaking. A huge part of the game is the rule that 'if you are a triangle, you can kill the enemies when they are also a triangle'. I couldn't figure out how the code for that, so there isn't a way of killing the enemies but they can kill you. Here is a clip of this bug in action.

The second bug is during the rotation of the enemy sprites. The enemies change sprite when the countdown hits zero which is normal, but sometimes they turn invisible. I couldn't figure out how to fix this either. Here's a clip of that right now.

Sketch

When I started creating my game, I first created a sketch in 'Paint' of the first room. 

Sprites

My sprites consist of all the shapes that you and the enemy can be, my sprite, the walls, lives(heart), collectibles,  and the numbers for which sprite will be next. I made all these shapes myself in GameMaker Studio and each of them has an animation. The animations are flashing colours, spinning clockwise, shrinking and wobbling.

obj_me (Player)

There are a lot of parts to my player object. <left> <right> <up> and <down> all controls the movement of the player (arrow keys). There is also collision events with every corner shape, so i can change into that shape. There's a collision with the wall so you don't go through it, and there is a collision with the player so when you touch it, you will die and respawn. When you die, you also explode, with audio. And finally, i have a draw event which displays a the amount of lives remaining.

Objects

Here is the rest of my objects. The ones with white sprites are invisible and are only made so they can be put in the room. 

'controller' contains the global variables i used. 'spriteto' is the shape the enemies are currently, and 'spritenext' is what they will change into next. 

'obj_ecircle' is the name of my enemy. The create event lets them move by themselves, the collision with the wall makes them bounce off the walls, and the collision with the player draws the number of lives. Here is the code i used for the draw event on 'obj_ecircle'.

Room

This is the first room in the game. It looks almost identical to my sketch. I made this just after i made my objects and added things to it as I went a long. 

Background 

This is the image I chose to use. I got it from a royalty-free website. I chose this one because it suits my game and matches the 'Shape' theme.

Sound

I've used 2 audio files for my game. One is an explosion sound which happens when the player dies, and the other audio file is my background music which plays on a loop. Both of these audio files were gathered from a royalty-free website.

How it turned out, and improvements
In conclusion, I think my game fits the client brief apart from the 2 bugs i have reported. If they were fixed, my game would match the brief much better. I looked into making the walls move and morph, but sadly it wasn't a success so I kept that part out of the game.

Here's a clip of my friend play the game.

After letting my friend, Wyatt play my game, he said how I could improve it. He recommended adding in a sound effect for when the player picks up a collectible or kills an enemy, and a way you can use the score from killing enemies and collecting balls. He recommended a shop screen after you complete the first level, where you can use your score to improve movement speed or the ability to carry more lives. I completely agree with these recommendations and think they would improve the game.

Here's the game manual i made for Shape Man. Sorry if its bad quality.

Gaming Trends

Morten Holland
Games Design L3

Gaming Trends

The gaming industry has changed a lot over the past 10 years, which means lots of trends have appeared to either improve the gamers’ experience, or to help game creating businesses. Here are some of the trends.

Streamers and YouTubers

The amount gamers play and watch other gamers play games have drastically changed in the recent years, due to the popularity of the Twitch.tv and YouTube commentaries. 100 million people watch people play games on the Twitch.tv service a month which shows just how much time people watch people play. Game creators now have to think about if a game will be enjoyable to play and watch. Some games may even incorporate the fans in some way.

Some games such as ‘Gang Beasts’ and ‘Goat Simulator’ are aimed directly at streamers and commentators. The companies of these games provide wacky and fun content that’s entertaining to watch and play. Something that's easy to watch, that you don't have to pay attention to a story or characters.


Second Screen Experience

Studies show that a huge percentage of gamers use phones and tablets for a considerable amount of time, so it would only make sense to incorporate those devices to the gaming experience too. Many gamers can now link up their devices to gain extra content in  hundreds of video games, such as 'Assassins Creed Unity'. This game has chests placed throughout the map that require progress from the mobile game to open. These chests contain outfits and weapons that cannot be gotten any other way, which can be good and bad. It can be good because it adds more content to the game, but it could be bad because it excludes some players from content if they do not own a tablet or mobile device.

Some games such as 'Skylanders' have restricted content that can only be accessed by using toys. Some of these characters are only playable if the gamer owns the right toy.


Storage

Memory sticks and USBs aren't the only ways of storing your game saves now. With the advancement of the gaming industry, game saves can now be stored in the 'Cloud' which is a non-physical storage device that's free. It basically allows gamers to save their games and profiles right onto the internet, so they can be used elsewhere or even as a backup save.' Cloud saving isn't just for gaming, but it can be really helpful if you are going to a friend's house to play a game.

Also, the amount of space a storage device can hold is becoming ridiculous. The newly released consoles such as the 'Xbox One' come with a built in storage device that has 500GB of space. For an Xbox One, that won't hold a tonne of games. The console before that was the 'Xbox 360' and 500GB would be an unnecessary amount of space. This shows how quickly the storage devices are expanding but also how much space games are taking up. External hard drives for Xbox One can be as big as 4 TB (Terabytes/1000GBs).


Social Networking

Now in gaming, the social and communication aspects are pretty big. For example, the Xbox One has an 'Active Feed' where people can share video clips they made in-game, screenshots and statuses, similar to 'Facebook' or 'Twitter'. You can also share your clips or screenshots straight to Twitter and Facebook.


Early Access

Companies such as 'Valve' and 'Microsoft' have made early access programs that allow players to play games that are still in development or early stages, so they can help make the game better. The gamers voice their opinion on what they like and dont like, and can even report bugs. This helps both the game developers, and the fans of the games.

'Steam' has an early access feature and 'Microsoft' has 'Preview Program' which is the same, but this also lets you use apps that Microsoft have started working on.

Players as Creators

Due to the high success of the hit game 'Minecraft', companies have been implementing the 'Players as creators' feature. This is where games are highly focused on creating levels yourself, as a player. A good example is 'Mario Maker'. This game gives players the assets for a game such as sprites and images so gamers can make their own levels, and share them online for others to play which creates a huge bank of player created levels.

Another game that has this feature is 'Grand Theft Auto V'. This game also has a bank of player created races, deathmatches, capture the flags, etc.

eSports and Tournaments 

Competitive gaming has come a long way since split-screen local games. Gaming events all over the world attract huge amounts of gamers to watch people compete for thousands of dollars over games such as 'Call of Duty' or 'Counter Strike'.

I think the main reason people enjoy watching these events are that people like to follow a team that plays a game. Someone to root for. The two most famous teams in 'Call of Duty' are named 'FaZe' 'OpTic' and they compete in gaming events a lot and earn money from it too.

Very similar to the Twitch.tv services or the YouTube sevices, these events can be free or can cost money for tickets or even entrance tickets to participate in the event.