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.