What did I do for this project?
It's been nearly 3 years but luckily I got a big ol' devlog for reference!
Everything (Besides Programming and SFX)
Considering this entire project was meant to help me get into the art branch at HKU I focused mainly on thinking and painting up everything regarding the game. Most of my time was spent on just the visuals alone, with level design only coming in at the tail end.
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Couldn't have done it without the help of my good programmer friend Casper though. He made sure that all my ideas could actually move around because at this point I wasn't really confident in my own programming yet. He did a great job and delivered everything neatly on time. Absolutely invaluable to this project.
Temporary SFX was also implemented by him for the sake of gamefeel if we had more time I would have made my own.
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Subsequent entries will go more in-depth now.
Animation
This project was a perfect opportunity for me to finally get into 2D animation! I had dabbled before but now I could really get into it.
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I spent a lot of time researching various techniques and looking at how one of my favourites (Skullgirls) handled its animation.
I was set on doing frame by frame because I thought 2D rigs wouldn't look great. It made for more work but I learned a lot.
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I specifically designed my main and other characters to work well for frame by frame animation by keeping the amount of detail low.
Game Design
This entire game runs on the premise of being built with a specific audience in mind.
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Sick kids in hospitals.
I had the bright idea to have the game be set in a hospital for that reason alone. And have the player be a surviving patient who gets to be the hero of the hospital! Thought it'd be fun to offer an environmentally relevant bit of escapism to the actual patients who would play this on an iPad for example. This is also why the game is built for mobile devices, to keep it affordable for potential clients.
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As for the actual game's design it was always intended to just be a simple 2D platformer that anyone could quickly grasp and get into. Hospital patients are pretty diverse range of players, some of the may not have ever played a game before. So I wanted the game to be simple and teach you stuff naturally.
I tested this by letting my parents play it on my phone, and sure enough. After enough trial and error even they managed to beat it!
Project Management
For this game, as usual. I set up a Trello and MoSCoW to keep nice oversight on what needed to be made at a time and set out to complete as much as I possibly could with my limited time
(About 5 weeks.)
Ultimately I only ended up using 3 of those weeks because I got myself into a burnout by pushing too hard on my weekly goals.
Animation took a lot of time and studying various sources to better understand meant I wasnt actively making new frames.
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Despite the characters being fairly simple I still suffer from my own perfectionism which meant that animation took up most of my time on this project. Which ultimately left me with less time to work in actual enemies for example.
But hey, those enemies would need to be animated too :)
Looking back
Having played this project again about 3 years later for this portfolio update. I see quite a lot of things I've since improved upon with projects that are currently in development. A pretty major one being how little the player can see ahead for example.
I've also gotten better with animation and art in general thanks to my time (albeit short) at the HKU and subsequent personal time since.
And I've also started carrying the programming of most gameplay stuff on my own. I can now comfortably remake everything you see in this demo alone. But it will take me longer than my programmer friend most likely.
Save for actually making it work on mobile, I haven't programmed stuff like that yet hehe.
Oh and tilesets. This entire project was built with hand-placed tile prefabs instead of simply using the tileset tool.
I don't know why I didn't use it at the time, I really don't. But I love using it now.
This is what the animations would have looked like if I had more time. I didn't put this into the game because it would break the flow that the sketch animations had.
Concept Art
The main character! The image itself should do most of the explainin' work.
Hospital's crawling with em.
Did not make it into the game at all. The Player's first objective would be to escape out the front door. Which would be locked, the helpdesk lady would pop out to taunt the player before transforming into the first boss. She'd be strung up by phone wires!
Just a lil demonstration of how everything is ordered
Not much to note about this
This was made for the programmer. I wanted enemy impacts to be punchy so I had cooked back a simple knockback system that could make it more convincing. We did not have time.
