(the new title card)
For my conference project, I continued working on my second group game, “Light the Lamps” (which was a continuation of my first group game, “Relay.”) I renamed the game “Lamp Lighter,” and updated it quite a bit. In “Lamp Lighter,” you play as the titular character whose job it is to protect its city’s lamps from evil bats who seek to snuff out their light with red goo.
Background:
As I mentioned in my post about my second group game, I wanted to add a background that was Victorian London-esque. I’ve included pictures of my drawing process:
(the first sketch)
(after another sketch, the line work process started)
(the finished background!)
I decided to keep the background mostly gray with highlights of yellow.
Player:
After play testing my second group game in class, I decided to change the color of the player and make an avatar for it, to really help it stand out against the background:
Bad Guys:
Though I toyed around with random motion for a bit, I ultimately decided to keep my bad guys moving vertically in a straight line across the screen, but with random x coordinates, so that they’re not too predictable. Random motion ultimately made the bad guys too unavoidable, and this way the player really has a chance to explore the terrain of the game.
I also updated the globs that the bats spit at the lamps to make them more texturally appealing – rather than just one single red color, they’re various shades of orange and red.
Power Ups:
As I mentioned in my post about the different states of my bad guys, I decided to add a power-up to help the player stay alive. The power up looks like a glowing blue ball, and, when collected, it freezes the movement of the bats and turns their eyes blue. They can still shoot fire, they just can’t move around temporarily. The power-ups generate randomly throughout the screen and then quickly shrink away. As soon as one disappears, another one reappears.
(the power-up)
(a frozen bad guy)
Sounds:
Finally, to put the finishing touches on the game, I added some sound effects from freesound.org. To start, I added an eerie track of multiple people whispering for the soundtrack. I also added an ominous noise for when new bad guys spawn (which happens whenever you press on the screen,) and a freezing noise for when a player collects a power-up.
All in all, I’m really please with how this game turned out. I definitely got it to where I wanted it to be aesthetically, though there’s always room for improvement. There are still some bugs in the code that I’d like to work out (lamp posts staying red even after the player touches them, bad guys never unfreezing, etc), but once those are taken care of, I might have my first “finished” game.
