Project #7 Autobiographical Game
Code of the sketch If sound is not audible please open in editor.
Description
For this assignment, we design an autobiographical game in which we take use of arrays, classes and objects. I made a game about my fear of darkness. I have always been afraid of the dark, even I as a baby I used to shiver in the dark, something my mom told me, LOL.
I feel like it is because I see things or imagine things that aren't there. My brothers and sisters used to have a lot of fun scaring me in different ways. I thought I'd grow out of this fear eventually by watching a lot of horror movies but it was a bad idea because every scene now haunts me more.
So in this game I make a character which a little sacred girl which is me. And this character wakes up at night and is scared to go outside the room, when she does go out she encounters scary witches that haunt her from Bollywood movies.
The sketches I initially made around my idea of game had everything that I was afraid of due to some connection to it, for example spiders, snakes, lizards, ghosts, witches or monsters from familiar Bollywood movies.
This game is made like a fighting game where you fight these scary elements to win or if you run in the opposite direction out of fear you fail to overcome your fear.
Design Process
I started my ideation with sketches of different monsterous entities and tried to figure out how to translate them into p5.js sketches, it was when I saw this lecture on how images can be replaces as objects of classes I realisd that I can make any vectors for my monstrous characters.
For my scene setting I knew I wanted to make something that was inside an old house where a character wakes up at night time and has to navigate the scary halls. I decided to make the scene setting in an ancient mansion called "Haveli" in india. In my grey box for the game I focused on creating a fight scene for the characters and a few scenes for the bedroom, the hall, the kitchen etc.
In the grey box shown below the left one is the main character and right one is the monsterous entity, with a poking stick or sword the main character jabs at the monsterous entity to kill it. I showed this kill succession with decreasing the opacity of the monstrous entity at each hit till it becomes transparent and the win scene pops up. If the main character exits the scene it automatically changes to a scene where you have failed to overcome these fears.
I initially wanted to keep so many scenes with scary settings and fighting characters, but due to the constraint of making of many characters and coding each scene in a separate setting, adding sounds etc. I decied to keep it minimal, also because whatever I imported led the p5.js scene to freeze and so I had to redo alot of my assets, especially the monster vectors and sounds. I think the funniest part about making this game was that I myself got scared everything I made something spooky and would end up screaming at my own characters.
Reflection
My main focus was understanding the difference between p5.js and other coding languages like C++, Python and Java. Integration switch case in this manner for changing scenes seemed like a good use of it, which I hadn't seen before in other coding scenarios. Another one was how classes are made and instantiated, the use of constructors seems very limited to me in p5.js. It is a good learning experience though. I also weren't able to fix the issues I had after grey box was working, so that felt frustrating because the internet doesn't have enough tutorials for specific issues and taks. This assignment was a good exploration of this language, I hated and loved to experiment different ways of coding things. My other realisation I had was that my idea for making this game concept was a bad decision because I underestimated how easily I get scared. All throughout the making of characters in Adobe