What design decisions did you have to make while creating your game?
I wanted the game to be simple, but still fun, exciting, and a little bit challenging to play. I wanted to choose a color scheme that felt welcoming, and I wanted to have the ellipses moving quickly across the screen so as to spark some urgency in the user. I had to think about what design ideas were most important to me, while also keeping in mind feasibility. I had to think about whether or not it was worth it to move onto a new idea if something was taking me too long to figure out, or if that thing was vital enough to the game that I had to bring it life. I considered a lot of different ways of keeping the game minimalist yet still fun, and ultimately love the game I made.
What worked well?
Once I got the hang of Processing, it was pretty easy for me to get the foundation of my game created. Within a few hours, I had basically everything working and looking the way I wanted to, except for the collisions. Once I finally got those down, with a lot of help from Prof. Soros, I think the collisions worked perfectly with the rest of the game. I overall think that my game has a really nice flow to it. There’s a lot of potential for things I can add to it as we learn more in class and I’m excited about the ideas I have for future levels!
What didn't work well?
I struggled a fair amount with the programming, mainly with the collisions. It was hard for me to conceptualize what exactly was happening when the objects were colliding, and I was supposed to protect against different edge cases. Some of my ideas for ways I could add to my game are a bit beyond my development abilities right now, so sometimes I had to put my ideas to the side which didn’t feel great.
If you had to do this assignment again, what would you do differently?
If I had to do this assignment again, I would definitely start it earlier so that I could ask for help, if I needed it, sooner. I felt overwhelmed with this assignment which took some of the joy out of it (by the end of it, I was having a lot of fun). There’s a lot more I wanted to add to this version of the game, but since I’ve already spent a really long time on it, I figured it was best that I just get it done at this point and keep all my exciting ideas in mind for next time!
What external resources did you use? List sources for any code examples that were copied/modified.