#development gdev gamedev

Hey! So I made another game, well actually two.. sort of. Since week one I have had an idea for a game and was told to save it for racing week, and this weeks game was racing! I had thought a lot about this idea and what I wanted to focus on with the make of this game. With my previous game, I wanted to learn a lot about gdevelop and how to incorporate mechanics and store information using variables. This week, wanting to do something different, I decided to have my main focus on the visuals rather than the back end itself. In other words I wanted to make a basic game with extremely immersive surroundings. I wanted the race to almost feel like a short movie. 

Fullerton said in chapter 9, “One way to look at designing a game is that it is a process that makes a vision real. A team often begins with a vision of their game. That vision has many parts and may be expressed in many ways.” I definitely considered exactly how I wanted to execute the make of this game prior beginning. This can be beneficial as I can save time messing around with ideas and get straight to what I want.. However doing this method may miss potential opportunities to make the game even better. Part of developing is trying new things and seeing what design works best. Another problem with using this method is imagining something that you cannot make. This is a big mistake for beginning game designers and I definitely considered this when making my game but decided to try create something I envisioned since week 1.

Im definitely not very good at art (hence the scribble art in the last game haha), but I wanted to really throw myself at it and try to make a game that isnt the typical car racing game. I decided to make a simulator disguised as a race. This concept was originally to be a drowning simulator, highly inspired by the game ‘Drowning Simulator’ itself. In the game ‘Drowning Simulator’ the player would fall off the end of a boat and be required to constantly scroll up to stay afloat, making it a sort of racing experience, in that they are racing against the game. As time goes on, the player would realise that this boat that they were calling out for would never come back, forcing the player to stop scrolling and drown. 

This game was made as an advertisement to life jackets. So I was inspired to re-create this game in my own way with my own style. When I was younger, I practiced typing by playing a game, called ‘Adventures of Typing with Timon and Pumba’. This game had an interesting mechanic that I have not since seen in a game, and this is where players saw a letter on the screen and would have to press it as quick as they could to get the next one. It seems pretty straight forward, but I remember how stressful it was when racing against the clock and unable to locate exactly where this key was. I thought this mechanic paired with the drowning simulator would be a great fit for my racing game.

So before jumping straight into the visuals I had to make my mechanic. The concept was, the player would be constantly sinking, and as they pressed the correct key displayed on screen, the players character would move up an amount of distance. Players would need to press the keys correctly to get to the top of the water before the timer ran out. With the additional constant force down, this would hopefully give the feeling of the player getting deeper into the water. Though this mechanic was easy on paper, I had quite some trouble with making it.

I had to learn about child variables and how to use them effectively, and I found the mechanic would get stuck constantly on a random letter and I was unsure how to fix it. After discussing with many friends and troubleshooting the problem for a number of days, I then had the finished mechanic. I then also incorporated a speed round where players could spam 2 keys for 10 seconds and make a lot of progress upwards. This would break up the repetitiveness of the overall game. After successfully adding this, I was to get into the art of it and increase the immersion level. 

I went with a gradient from dark blue on the bottom to almost white on top to simulate the feeling of being under water. For the speed round I wanted to really spark panic in the player, So I created various dark shadows around the border of the screen and looped them through at a high rate so they would almost flicker.

Gif of speed round:

https://giphy.com/gifs/cX4eL9HEo3jlBZpdEA

I created music to heighten the sensory input drastically, having soft ambient yet eery music with a 10 second frantic overloaded sound for the panic speed round. Everything was making sense so far, before I began realising this game seemed pretty bland. I could’ve added bubbles and seaweed into the water to continue creating the environment, however I felt this would take away from the experience I was trying to simulate. So I began to shift my idea to simulate anxiety, which can feel like drowning. This would allow me to add more and have everything I had continue to make sense. For the next parts, I was heavily inspired by the simulator game ‘Anxiety Attack’. This game would take place in a forest where players would be visually thrown words and lights and sounds to make them feel uncomfortable. However the main mechanic of this game was to time pressing the space bar perfectly to simulate breathing. I decided, similarly to ‘Anxiety Attack’, have disturbing messages pop up throughout the game.

My idea was that this would distract the player from the main objective of the game, to get to the top of the water, which one can argue is similar to real life situations. In the mean time, I had also decided I could do ‘a second level’ where its almost the same thing, however its in the setting of a forest, and the player is running away from a dark mass. 

I wanted the transition for ‘level 1’ to ‘level 2’ to have purpose, and continue the idea of it being an experience rather than a game, so I decided when the timer is close to running out, Ill add a lot of permanent force to the character so they drop through all the progress they had made, and the screen would cut out to black.

I completed adding and timing all of the messages, the scene transition, and was working on the forest when I realised this had nothing to do with racing, at all... I had twisted was racing is to fit it into an idea I had at the beginning of the course. And frankly the gaming experience of this prototype was not good, and everything I made was just a cheesy combination of the games inspired by it. At this stage it was Monday, and it had to be completed on Tuesday morning.. Part Two of development coming up.

Gdev code:

etc.