Journal Entry 3 - game design

Date: 5.8.2021

After making sure I would be capable of making this game it's time to decide a theme.

I want a jungle/monkey themed game. However that alone would be pretty boring so I came up with a twist. The game will be about monkey which is allergic to bananas. So it has to discover new food source to not starve.

There will be fruit (and perhaps vegetables too) falling from the above (trees) and the player will have to collect them to score points. There will also be objects which hurt the monkey, including banana.

I'm going to try to find some free and unlincensed art I could use.

Monkey:  https://opengameart.org/content/cartoon-animals

Fruit and other food: https://opengameart.org/content/platformer-pickups-pack

Bomb: https://opengameart.org/content/bomb-1

Jungle decorations: https://opengameart.org/content/jungle-graphic-for-indie-game-developer

I picked a nice food pack containing mostly fruit but some sweet items like cake on candy cane as well. Perhaps I could implement those sweet  edibles as bonus items. Now comes the part where I need to decide on how scoring will work.

The player starts with zero points. The score will work as a "meter" of how well fed the monkey is. When the score falls below zero the monkey loses/dies.

At the start of the game only items with positive score will be falling down to allow to gather some points and not die immediately.

Items with positive score:

cherries, grapes, carrot, orange, apple, pear

- for simplicity all of those will award 1 point

Items with negative score:

lemon -1 (sour, only small loss)

chilli pepper -3 (spicy, better to avoid)

banana -10 (allergy, stay away)

Special items:

candy cane +5, speed boost

cake +5, slows down all falling object

bomb -5, slows down the player

As the game progresses more items will spawn and negative items will get more common.

There needs to be a screen where player can see what all the items do. Or maybe to make it more engaging the player will get to know effects as they play. But the player absolutelly needs to be aware about allergy to bananas. (Should it be included in the game's title?)

I have decided to make main menu which will show three categories of items (good, bad and special) but without telling player exact score and effects to make first few playthroughs more exciting as the player figures out how objects work.

Date: 11/12.8.2021

To spawn objects I made Spawner object as it didnt make sense to attach spawner script to any other object. I added sprites into FallingObject prefabs which now get chosen randomly. 

I also have to detect collision of object and player but that was easy to add as it was similar to collisions with walls.

For now I only implemented score system without special effects, I will add those later. In the first few seconds of the game I allow only good objects to spawn so the player has time to prepare themselves and gain some starting score.

I added few decorations into the game scene (palm and some grass) to make it feel more like jungle.

Date: 17.9.2021

It's time to finish the game. I need to add special effects to bonus items. That was quite easy to implement. I just added timers for each effect and bonus object increases the score. When the score is positive it automatically decreases by time delta between each frame. The only tricky one to implement was slowing down all falling objects after collecting a cake.

The game needs a main menu in order to show basic info, controls and to restart the game after every death. 

This tutorial was very helpful, I got the basic idea of how to make a menu screen and then implemented my own. I have added some basic info about the game. I decided to name the monkey George. I used only basic colours and game sprites to not waste time on designing some complex UI.

This is how the main menu looks like:

When the player dies some screen to show their highest score needs to appear. At first I wanted to put score into main menu and return the player there. But after I made the main menu the score wouldn't fit into it and I didn't like the idea anymore. Instead I added a "death screen" UI into game scene and it appears after each death. The player is then sent into main menu for the game scene to refresh. 

I have implemented system for fruit to fall faster and spawn more as the game progresses. To make the game challenging I also increase chance of bad food appearing as the time progresses and decrease the good food. Otherwise it would be too easy to keep positive score and the game would never end.

After I first built the game I discovered some bugs I had to fix. For example the camera was completely different size due to my monitor width and some texts were off. So I had to fix game area barriers to cover more screen space and anchor some text elements to their respective positions.

Game screenshot:

Death screen: