First Presentation due – Prototype

The first game we decided to work on was the dog park sprinting game. We whipped up a quick version just in time for the prototype deadline. The graphics are all blocky with bold lines to try for a cartoon/hand drawn look.

The bar at the top is the dogs’ happiness level which impacts the score and speed in which the dog runs. The dog face would move across the bar and changes expression as an indicator as to how he feels. The items that come on screen are chosen at random however the good items only come on after 4 consecutive taps of the bad items to prevent spam taping the screen. The dogs’ movement is random so if the player misses an item then there’s a chance the dog will hit it. The background is made up of a tiling system that lays down a fence along the top and bottom of the screen then fills the space between with grass tiles and an occasional dirt patch. The tiling system was a challenging task for me and a lot of time searching the web for help as I had to find a way to get all the tiles to move at once without gaps and run smoothly but I’m happy with the outcome.

Below are a few screenshots of what the game looked like on the Prototype Stage:

The feedback we got from the teachers was that the game wasn't very fun and the graphics looked bad. They felt as if the storm was a pointless idea, and that the dog shouldn’t actually be moving randomly but maybe give the illusion. In response to the feedback I removed the storm cloud and tweaked with the speed increments and the timing of objects coming onto screen. I also reworked the dogs’ movement so now instead of moving randomly, he now moves up or down to the closest object coming his way so now the player has to tap the items otherwise the dog will get them. They suggested refining the scope of the game (make it about feeding the dog instead of avoiding bad things for dogs and collecting good things). They also said the game would look better if we used vector based graphics instead of bitmaps.