How it Came to be
During the time of my grade 12 computer science class, the COVID-19 pandemic had been a very recent development (March 2020). As such, nearing the end of the course, the teacher instructed us to create any sort of application that was both unique and informed the user about COVID-19 and how to stay safe.
My partners (Gary Q. and Brian K.) and I all shared a similar interest in video games, and as such, decided to develop an informative game. Around this time, I had been getting back into some of the retro games of my childhood, such as Paper Mario 64 and Flappy Bird, which were all generally done using a pixel art graphics style. I really liked this aesthetic, and when discussing potential ideas for the game, we mutually agreed on this art style.
When discussing about the actual game idea and development, a platformer was not what we initially started with. We had ambitions to create a 3-dimensional game similar to Super Mario Galaxy, but came across many challenges and eventually scrapped the idea (will discuss in the challenges section). Finally, after scrapping our old idea and starting from scratch, we finished the project by working day-and-night for 2 weeks straight. This effort was not in vein, because, at least to me, it is one of my proudest personal accomplishments.
What is the Game?
As I mentioned earlier, the game is 2-dimensional platformer using a pixel art graphics style. It is meant to be a fun way to inform the user about COVID-19, through text queues and the objective of the levels itself. The plot is simple - Blackbeard's (your) ship broken down on an island filled with "the infected", which is analogous to people who are infected with COVID-19. Your goal is to collect the materials you need to fix the ship and re-embark on your voyage without getting infected.
The game contains a tutorial level displaying all the movement and in-game mechanics, preparing the user for each level and its potential uniqueness. The actual game consists of 3 levels, with each having their own objective and game level design, progressively getting more and more difficult. At the end of these 3 levels, the game is complete.
The first playthrough would take around 20 minutes.
Experience Developing the Game
To the eye, a platformer looks like a very simple game, and to extend that opinion, creating it must be easy. Right? My answer to that would both a definitive yes and no. If you have decent experience with game design, then it would be quite simple, as the concepts such as object collision, movement physics (jumping, strafing) and the actual level designs are nothing new, and you can construct them quite easily. However, if this is your first rodeo, there are many challenges you will face regarding the concepts stated previously. Learning these and implementing them are arduous and frustrating, as more often than not, you will spend most of your time debugging unforeseen errors. It is a long process, but at the end of it, was quite satisfying.
As you can probably tell, I fell into the latter end of levels of experience, as this was my first attempt at making a somewhat legitimate game. I spent hours upon hours just watching tutorials and breaking my head over my own code, until miraculously, it would work (coincidentally always at 2am). In retrospect, I would call it a good experience, but if you asked me when I was creating the game, you'd think I was going insane. I think my group members would also share a similar sentiment.
An experience I did enjoy was the collaborative work, and the joy we would share when something worked. Through the multiple late night calls and time spent just watching tutorials, teaching each other things or helping debug code, our bonds strengthened, and to this day, both of them are some of my best friends I have. A crucial part of this process was helping out each other, which we actually did quite well. Whenever someone was dejected or frustrated, the other two of us would take the time to understand why and help alleviate this frustration. Nothing is more important than mental health, and we would make sure everyone is alright before proceeding with work. Through consideration and strong teamwork, this made the development experience so much more successful and enjoyable.
Challenges Faced
There were a lot of challenges through the course of the game's development. Starting off, we wanted to use an open-source game-development application, LibGDX, to create our original 3-dimensional game idea. After spending a few days of dedicated learning of the graphical library's syntax (because we had to learn the entire graphics language by ourselves, it was not taught in class), we found out that the application would not work on one of our group member's computer. So just as we were about to begin the process of creating the game after all this learning, we had to scrap everything and go back to step 1.
After this, we decided to use, JSwing, but also had to learn it from scratch. After doing so, development finally started, which opened a whole new can of worms. In terms of creating the screen states, flow of the program and its classes structure, this was a relatively easy process. However, understanding how to create the game physics was quite difficult. There were many minor issues, but I will mention the biggest one for me- object collision. I was in charge of majority of the gameplay development, and to learn object collision wasn't hard, but to implement it without all the bugs was an effort. If you asked me now, I could do it quite easily (as I did recently for a mini math game I created), but learning it for the first time was incredibly difficult to me. After countless tutorials and debugging it with my friends, it finally worked, but it was a test of mental fortitude.
The rest of it wasn't too bad, other than commenting for around 5000 lines of code in a few hours. However, this was an invaluable learning experience, because never again will I leave commenting for the end. It adds lots of clarity when you are going through your code during development, and also saves unneeded effort at the end of your creation.
What's next for Blackbeard's Breakout - 2-Dimensional Platformer
I really wanted to continue creating this game and make it a lot longer than it currently is, but I got sidetracked and never got back to this. In the future, although I won't be continuing this idea, I do wish to do something similar but with more length and complexity. This being my first true game developing experience, it has taught me a tremendous amount, and will help me in my future endeavors in application development.
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