Introduction:
Colorful was my first competitive video game. I created the art for it using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator from scratch. I programmed everything using GameMaker Language. This project was submitted to the Miami-Dade County Fair and Exposition where it won second place in the Video Game Design Category. The project took about 1 month of planning, 3 months of development and 1 month of bug fixes and improvements before it was ready for competition.
The story:
In a faraway planet known as Laytis, exists a world of small, yet incredibly smart creatures known as "Goobs." These creatures are more advanced than the human race in terms of information about the world, and they are currently creating a worldly encyclopedia. They are currently missing some important information about art in the planet of Earth, which just happens to be our planet! In this game, you will enter the world of Laytis and take the role of Abe, a worker in the National Information Organization of Laytis and you will explore three main art periods in our history: The Stone Age, The Egyptian Era, and the Greek and Hellenistic period. You can use your handy time machine to travel back and forth between periods until you collect the handy documents in each one!
Level 1- The Secrets of the Stonehenge
This is the first level of Colorful. You will be prompted to a dark cave where you will have to pass multiple enemies and have a final boss battle in order to earn the book containing the Secrets of the Stonehenge. In this level, I learned to create a variable in order to be able to open a locked door once the player obtains the chest. Some pseudo code that could show this event would look something along the lines of..
If player has key;
When player clicks the door, destroy the door;
Else;
Do nothing.
As you can see, there was a need for a variable to be true in order for the player to “have the key”.
I also learned to simulate a boss fight using a controller object with some hard coding, which would be created in the room once the player followed a certain amount of steps. This boss fight controller also created a massive health bar in the middle of the player’s screen in order to see the boss’ health.
Level 2- The Egyptian Pyramids
This is the second level of Colorful. The player will be taken to Egypt, where he will have to avoid plentiful of angry crabs and solve the puzzle in order to obtain the book containing information about the Egyptian Pyramids. In this level, like level 1, I used
many kinds of variables to add strategy onto my game. I learned to destroy all the similar objects in a room with an if statement, and I also created a variable which worked similar to an inventory. It allowed the player to place an instance of an object once they collected the backpack. There was also some simple jumping parkour at the end of the level which if the player were to miss, they would be forced to restart the level all over again. This level mainly consists of mechanical skill and logical thinking.
Level 3- The Mysteries of Athens
This is the final level of Colorful. The player will travel to Athens, the capital of Greece. The player will then enter the Parthenon, a famous architectural structure where he will have to pass the security system created by the Greeks in order to protect their mysteries. This level has many statues that
will fire lasers every 2-4 seconds. The difficulty increases as you go further underground, because the lasers will fire faster each time. For this level, it is obvious that I learned the alarm system of Gamemaker. I learned that you must define the number of steps in an alarm and then give the alarm an action for when it is fired. The statues will first fire a laser every 4 seconds on the first level of the underground Parthenon, then 3 seconds, and lastly 2 seconds. This was possible by having duplicates of the statue objects, each one with a different value of seconds. This level consists of mainly mechanical skill and timing.
Mechanics
Colorful is a platformer, therefore there is gravity in the game. I was able to simulate jumping and falling using gravity by altering the vertical speed of the player object when the spacebar is pressed. The player was also able to move left, right, up and down using the WASD keys and of course, the player will only able to move up and down when they are on a ladder.
Some objects, like those that have to deal with the UI are intractable by pressing E on your keyboard. Other objects, like the door, book, and chest, are intractable clicking on them.
Programming
Colorful was a combination of block coding and hard coding. Many if statements and variables were used in the hard coding, allowing for variation and enhancement in the game.
A list of what I learned!
•The game action is seen through a camera view.
•I learned to identify the life cycle of game design.
•I learned Object Oriented Programming (OPP) and how to script effective functions using variables, parameters, and operators
• I learned to program action qualifiers, conditions that must be met before a block of code will execute.
•I learned to program player movement by testing the proximity of solid objects relative to the player.
•I programmed platforms and simulate gravity in a virtual world using conditions.
•I learned the Alarm system of GML and used it accordingly for my game.
•2D Games are classified by their spatial representation, dimensions are (x) width and (y) height.
•Vector images are defined by mathematical equations, as opposed to being made up of dots like bitmap images.
•Animating, while a lengthy process, is very rewarding and fun in a challenging way.
•I learned to program sprite images to match object movement.
•I learned to synthesize obstacles and objectives to make a game appropriate for the target market.
•I learned to create game refinements.
•I learned to create a fully functioning user-interface.
•I learned to program and refine climbing in a virtual world.
•I learned to program intuitive movements keys for ergonomic game play.
•I learned to Test gravity and how to Debug when necessary.
•I learned to program gravity simulation .
•I learned to manipulate vertical speed and gravity to simulate jumping in a virtual world.
•I learned to master entry level skills using Adobe Illustrator and earned an Illustrator Industry Certification Exam to validate those skills
•I enhanced my knowledge of the visual arts by applying the Elements of Art and Principles of Design
•I learned to create various variables to enhance my game.
•I learned to create controller objects to handle events.
•I learned to create a virtual environment using cartoon tile objects in Adobe illustrator.
•I learned to create object instances placed accordingly to the room’s view.
•Because I have applied science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) during the process of making my game, I have designed and developed a STEAM product making it exceptional.
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