Rocket Racer

GUH2019

We were inspired by the popular game Doodle Jump, which is an app where a character jumps from platform to platform, trying not to fall off.

Game Summary

The game we created has a rocket that flies upwards, which the user can move left and right. If the user catches a bee, they gain a point. If they bump into a cloud they lose a life. They have three lives and the game ends when they have used them all.

How we built it

We first designed a basic Doodle Jump type game, then we swapped out the default sprites and images with one's that we created ourselves. Next we altered the physics of the sprites in order to swap the game's gravity so that the rocket moved upwards instead of downwards. After that we had to randomly generate the bees and clouds so that each trial by the user would be a different level. We finally added in game messages and music to enhance the user's experience.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had little to no experience in Unity and c#, so a lot of our time was spent teaching ourselves the code syntax and app development as a whole. Most of the challenges we faced were due to our lack of knowledge in this language and development platform, for example we were not sure how to set boundaries to stop the rocket from leaving the main scene from the user's view. Another challenge we faced revolved around referencing variables in different scripts due to their object-orientated nature.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud of our resilience and sheer determination when it came to this daunting challenge of learning something completely new to us in 24 hours. Even though our game is relatively simplistic, it was a large feat for our team as a whole.

Skills we have learnt

None of us had developed an app before, so we learnt skills from building several scripts into a complete application. We also gained skills in management as we had lots of different tasks occurring at once and we had to divide these between us. We also enhanced our team working and communication skills as we had to explain our code to each other in order for the team to build on it.

Potential areas for development

We initially intended for there to be different levels of difficulty, involving faster speeds and more obstacles. We also wanted to add a fuel sprite where the rocket only lasts 10 seconds without fuel, and the game ends if they don't collect them in time. To enhance the user experience we also wanted to have different modes of transport, backgrounds and obstacles. We had also planned to incorporate a multiplayer mode where two players compete against each other at once to see who lasts the longest. Unfortunately we did not complete these features due to time constraints.

Built With

• c#
• unity