Week Three (07/10/24 - 13/10/24)

During week two, i spent my time during a lecture planning out what i was going to do and after careful consideration i decided on doing a 2D platformer as i feel it has the most potential and would be easier to make something interesting out of before the deadline is due. With having that said, the first thing i wanted to do was decide on a key mechanic, something that would make it different from other 2D platformers such as mario or celeste, i decided that this would be in the form of a physics ray gun that would allow players to pick up certain objects from a distance and move them around,  i did some research into raycasting and found that this would be the easiest solution as it would allow for realism in that if the ray goes through another object before reaching the desired moveable one it would not allow the player to pick it up and instead force them to try and grab it from a different angle.

On top of this i worked on the level design and tried to create an interesting place that could tell a short story at the same time, i took inspiration from the similar 3D game portal and used the laboratory walls and decor to create a blank room fillled with only the necessities, this comes from the science and experimentation route of being controlled and having no other outside stimuli other than what they testers are wanting you to see.

The workshop was spent looking at how to make games less random chance and more skill and thought, for this we looked at "Snakes and Ladders" a game based wholely on rolling a dice, getting a random number and then moving your token that many spaces, landing on a ladder allowing you to move upwards and landing on a snake forcing you to the tail end of the same snake. for this i worked in a group consisting of me and 4 other people as we looked at using different arrays of dice to change the outcomes, this led to an ability to choose between using a d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12, having larger minimums and maximums allowed for you to choose which random you would prefer, if you didnt want to move much you could opt for a smaller dice and if you wanted to move as fast as possible you would choose a larger dice, after this we tested out other games and looked at what they thought, it was an interesting activity to see what people had come up to and how it differed from our own.

Next week i want to spend some time working on 2D art and getting the main feature set up before i start to make it look nice and create more of a story base, eventually i would like to add some voice lines too and for that i may need to ask a friend or two to do some  voice acting for me.