IVETA STRIPEIKAITE
2D/3D Artist
FIRE RUN
Fire Run - Jan 2015
Dream Team: Iveta Stripeikaite, Ogrezeanu Gabriel Razvan, Tyrone Bellamy-Wood, Kailas Bryant, Chase Parsons
Fire Run is a 2D side scroller enless runner created using Adobe Flash Builder 4.7, ActionScript 3 and Starling
Click the video on your right to see a quick playthrough of Owly or try out the game yourself by clicking 'PLAY'.
TECHNICAL SPECS:
Minimum requirements for a mobile device:
* Android 2.33 Gingerbread or later
* Must support gyroscope
* Touch screen
* GPU
* 50MB Hard Drive Space
* 512 MB Min RAM
* 1.0 Ghz Min CPU Speed
MY PART
We had been assigned to create an app shell with four mini games inside it. We had decided to have a theme of four elements (Air, Earth, Fire and Water). I was in charge for creating a Fire game which I called Fire Run. I had to make mountain and fire related obstacles and objects in the game to relate the game to the fire theme so my main character is a fireball and my menu is made our of flames. The other obstacles and objects are made to fit the mountain theme (due to volcanoes and fire going well together). I also designed a usability test for our team which focused on playability (how fun the game is as well as player emersion and flow) and usability (mechanics, mappings, bugs, etc.).
DESIGN
When designing for my game we all decided that we wanted a simple animated 2D look. We wanted simple cell shaded objects with a small drop down shadow in the back which would simulate a 3D effect in the game. I used Illustrator to create all of my assets since you can scale vector images without losing quality of the graphic. I then exported my images as PNGs (for transparent objects) and JPGs (for backgrounds). I used Flash Pro to create my walking animation for my Fire Ball and I've used Texture Packer to create an xml file as well as a sprite sheet so I can import it into Flash Builder and play my animation. Overall I think that my designs don't look the best as I would of wanted to make my fire theme more recognizable.
PROGRAMMING
In terms of coding, I have been using starling which is a AS3 plug-in, which uses the GPU to process some of the code and takes some load off the CPU. This means faster gameplay. I also made sure to only call functions when they are needed and dispose of them after use to save processing time and keep the game at 60fps. I also do the same for my objects where I would add child when needed and remove it after use. I found it quite fun to learn AS3 when I came across some funny bugs. For example, randomly generating obstacles would appear next to each other making it impossible for the player to jump over them. To fix this I removed the obstacles from an array which I used to generate the obstacles from and instead gave each obstacle fixed coordinates where they should appear. This gave me more control of the obstacles but this also made me use negatives coordinates (which meant that the obstacles are not on the screen but are still being processed). However if I were to improve this game, I would make it into levels so that I can have full control of where certain obstacles are.
GAME FEATURES
Current Features:
-
Uses tap controls
-
Randomly generating obstacles
-
Interactive menu
-
Upgrades
-
Parralax moving background
-
Walk animation
Possible updates:
-
New walk cycle + death animation + jump animation
-
Make two versions: levels and endless runner
-
Change the background as you run further
-
Incoorporate upgrades in the game
-
Add more obstacles (such as lava)
-
Redraw some of the graphics to suit android's flat design principles
-
Add a control to let the player slow down
Long-term gains
It was great fun getting to create my own game in its entirety since I was able to create my assets how I have imagined them to look. I also had to research and learn how to code every function in my game which made me think that it was possible to solve any bug and any problems in my Fire Run as well as any of my future games. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning my first programming language and I am now confident to code more games on my own!