Visual Ideas & Tests

Logo ideas

These are sketched, drawn and coloured logo ideas that i have for my game. They each have positives and negatives, but are all good for their own reasons.

My second logo i used inspiration from a few logos that i saw looking at other peoples idea’s. This is not really a logo i am thinking about using, however it is a good concept that i could use some of it for my final logo piece.

This first logo was an idea that my Dad gave me as i originally was only going to do a skull, but then decided to try the controller buttons in the eyes. The skull is show the relation to the enemies, which are skeletons. And the buttons create a unique and a logo which people will remember and recognise the game by, without confusion with another game. However, the logo has no link to the main character.

This was my last idea as i was trying to think of a logo that could represent the main character and after a while i just realised that i could just use my main character for the logo, which surprisingly works nicely.

Background ideas

This background is a strange drawing where i used opacity and blur, plus smoothing to create this weird water and sky effect. I think it looks pretty good but i am sure there are other ideas that may turn out as a better option for the game.

This “Floating Island” piece i spent more time on using new brushes that i downloaded from a link in a youtubers description. They were free to use so there is not any copy-write licenses on the brushes. I decided to make the islands floating to create a spin on my original idea, to create a more interesting piece. I was much happier for the turn out of this than my last detailed piece.

These two ideas were both very good ones but i spent a lot of time on them that i may of wished to spend elsewhere so once i had done these and i was happy with them i did not want to try anything else, unless i had more time afterwards.

Character Ideas

With character ideas due to time available to me and some luck my first finished design i was very happy with. But before i did this i did have a look at different pirates in games to give me inspiration. I used my favourite website for this sort of thing, Pinterest. I even looked at ideas for the pirate to be an animal rather than a human, the idea was scrapped though.

After the inspiration i made my final idea come to life , using some free thought and components from what i found from some research.

If i had the time i would have spent more time doing a variety of sketches but due to my poor time management i would have had more flexibility with my work. So this would be something i need to work on. But the design of this pirate is good but also simple, the limbs simply shaped making it easy to move them to show movement to create animations.

Programming/Coding

I have minimum experience with coding i spent a lot of time on Youtube to find good tutorials that clearly showed me simple but effect ways of programming things to do certain tasks. Although, i have done player movement before in tasks previous i do not remember it too well and wanted to see if there were better ways or easier ways of making my character move.

I used two main Youtubers for this but i did use others for other little things that these two did not quite explain to me or do it well.

Brackeys

• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYbK_tjZ2OrIZFBvU6CCMiA

This first youtuber was recommended to me by Nathan, which i am grateful for him doing as Brackeys has some great videos that give me new ideas and improve my work that i have already done. These are some of the videos i watched:

This video gave me a refresh and a new way of creating the movement. And helped me when i had made a few mistakes or missed something in my coding that was creating errors and stopping my game from working.

Whilst looking at jumping i found the next youtuber.

Blackthornprod

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Z1XWw1kmnvOOFsj6Bzy2g

His videos were great and i would have loved to have used more of his if i had managed my time well so that i could add more complicated things to my game, however i did attempt one of his ideas which was his jumping higher by holding down the key. Somehow i could not get this to work and i decided to take a different route.

Below i have some of the coding i did for the movement and the jumping

Movement:

void FixedUpdate(){

isGrounded = Physics2D.OverlapCircle(groundCheck.position, checkRadius, whatIsGround);

moveInput = Input.GetAxisRaw(“Horizontal”);
rb.velocity = new Vector2(moveInput * speed, rb.velocity.y);

if (facingRight == false && moveInput > 0)
{
Flip();
}
else if (facingRight == true && moveInput < 0)
{
Flip();
}
}

Jumping:

 

void Update(){
if (isGrounded == true){
extraJumps = 2;
}

if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.UpArrow) && extraJumps > 0)
{
rb.velocity = Vector2.up * jumpForce;
extraJumps–;
} else if(Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.UpArrow) && extraJumps == 0){
rb.velocity = Vector2.up * jumpForce;
}
}

The extra jumping was me trying to create a two or three jump limit depending on which worked better. But there seemed to be something that was either incorrect or missing from the coding.

I also needed help from Brackeys for coding with menu’s as i have not done this at all and had no idea on how to do it. He had done a perfect video showing me how to do it and how you can play with it creating nice versions that had there own unique style. I used it as i could not find anything better.

Below is the coding for the menu set up:

public void PlayGame ()
{
SceneManager.LoadScene(SceneManager.GetActiveScene().buildIndex + 1);
}

public void QuitGame ()
{
Debug.Log (“Quit”);
Application.Quit();
}

}

In addition to this i needed more coding for the options menu so that i could click on the buttons and go between them and so they options menu actually worked as well. Below is the coding for this:

public AudioMixer audioMixer;

public void SetVolume (float volume)
{
audioMixer.SetFloat(“Volume”, volume);

Debug.Log(volume);
}

public void SetQuality (int qualityIndex)
{
QualitySettings.SetQualityLevel(qualityIndex);
}
}