Dev Log by Amelia

Developer Log

• Amelia Plocharczyk (C21311196)

“Don’t Touch The Walls” was created over the course of 2 months, by 4 game design students at Technological University Dublin. This is our final year project for one of our modules. We wanted to make a game that is simple but fun to play. The theme of this project was “The World Ends In 5 Minutes”.

The concept of the game is you must try to get through each level within 5 minutes, and each time you fail the timer will take away 5 seconds from the clock. But we decided on making the clock metaphorical to not put too much pressure on the player as well as extra frustration.  This game would essentially be considered a maze game. Each time you touch the walls you die. Each one of us worked on a different level. I created a couple different layouts and chose the one that fitted and looked the best. Thinking about a design for the first two levels wasn’t too hard. Something simple so anyone could pass but also more difficult than the tutorial level.

I decided on a theme of underwater. I wanted to make my theme different from the other levels created by the developers in my team.. Instead of making the walls neon I made them white and added lighting on the top to give the illusion of a big deep sea. The lighting nicely made the walls Ombre, the bottom darker and the top light. I stayed with a square for my character but I added on a different color for it. I added a light onto the player to make them look like they are traveling in the dark. The player starts of in a safe box, each time the player fails it will respawn in that box. Touching the walls of the safe box will not affect the player. This mechanic was intentionally created so that the player can position them self freely.  When the player gets to the end it will reach a bright lighting with a sprite which will lead them to the next level. But for the second level it will reach a  fishing hook

For my first level I added  diagonal walls for the player to experience a little bit more difficulty and start to make the game a  bit more interesting. I made some of the walls a little bit more hard to squeeze through. For my second level made the game a bigger maze with more walls and hard to squeeze through places. We did have some problems along the way like figuring out how to add the glow effect or writing some of the scripts, but we figured everything out.

We got some feedback from our peers and lecturers from our game testing class. Some people found the tutorial level hard because of the glow effect being put on the player making it difficult to see how close you are to the walls. Some of the levels were a bit too fast so we changed the players speed to make it easier to pass the level.

Over the course of the 2 months while creating this game with my team, I think we all can say we learned something new and had fun creating this little project. Seeing the positive feedback from our class peers made us feel very happy about what we created.

Assets used from Unity asset store: 

Underwater fantacy ; ANSIMUZ