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Team FireFly

University Project 1 - Ninja Katsui

My first project at university was to develop a point and click game; using the mouse as the only interface for manipulating  the game content and allow the player to progress through the game.

 

The target audience was for 12+year.

The target software for developing the game was Scratch 1.4.

The target hardware (platform) for the game was the Raspberry Pi B+.

 

The team: varied in skill - ranging from individuals like myself who have never programmed before and those that studied games development the previous year at college; we all had grand ideas and wanted to push the limits of what we could learn from this project.

 

I personally researched the following mechnics: expressing them with code - images shown below.

 

  • Gravity.

  • Randomising movements.

  • Hiding and showing content.

  • User Inputs: specifically text.

  • How to have the game respond to text inputs.

  • Broadcasting.

  • Changing backgrounds; using a variable as a switch.

 

Issues: optimizing the software to the Raspberry Pi hardware.

Our game was primarily deveoped on PC; whilst the target hardware was the Raspberry Pi, this created initial issues where the application run time was much slower in the target hardware; This resulted in several iterations taking place where the software had to be optimized to run at satifiactually on the Pi.

 

Changes such as altering the use of forever loops and only having calculations run when necessary was a typical over hall of the software. This meant linking the start up of methos of calculatiosn to the conditions of variable and or environments the player enters throughout the game.

Other stuff.

My Games Technology Bsc is structured to produce games programmers; however as part of all pojects I had to create the assets used in the game; such as

 

  • High, Medium & Low resolution assets.

  • Character design.

  • High Concept documents

  • Pipeline Document

  • Userability and Playtest documents.

 

Using software suites such as Adobe photoshop and illustrators I created the following artwork:

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