Hunt For the Ferret's Missing Toy
Tools Used:
This was my second game I worked on in CMPM 120 at UCSC. It was the follow up to Slug Fall, we used the same rendering and physics engine, Phaser 3, thus some of the problems with Slug Fall remain present. That being said this project was fun and I had my hands in pretty much everything, from art, UI, and programming.
Why Ferrets?
I ultimately came up with the idea of a game where you can control a ferret and have to pull around objects because I had a ferret named Scarlet, she would always take toys from downstair to up under my bed. Even though she wasn’t suppose to be there she always found a way to sneak in. There also hasn’t been that many examples of games where you play as a ferret so I think it made our game unique. all 3 of us on my team were happy with the idea and got to work.
Contributions
- Team Leader
- Pixel art
- Music
- Programming
- UI (Instructions / Buttons / item tracker)
Conclusion
This project ended up having extreme crunch. We spent the first week, Daniel and I, trying to get grabbing, button pressing and slinky physics for the main character. Having to scratch slinky physics no art and the other mechanics barely progressing, things were looking grim. The reason we ended up not having any art for our game at this point was that our main artist was MIA. Going forward, the lack of communication meant that I had to step up and take over the entirety of the art. I like working on art but doing all of it while also working as a programmer meant my work just doubled.
The art came out great, I like the soft colors and I think specific parts such as the instructions menu came out really well. The programming tasks I had done were mostly fine tuning all of the boiler code Daniel had done, adding assets and making sure they looked good, and spending hours on call and in person with Daniel to work through programming physics issues and implementation for grabbing, running, and physics simulations.
The only thing I wish I could change would be more accessibility options, and fixing the issue of game speed being affected by refresh rate.
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