Boom Out Log

The game is a result of the study of collider trigger, scene change, UI, game loops, etc. The idea of the logic and story of the game came from a daily experience of mine. It is very easy to trigger static electricity during the winter, and I found that this happens particularly frequently in my case, so I decided to make a game about triggering static electricity. I remember having a science class in elementary school. And at that time, my teacher used balloons to rub their hair and the balloon would hang over the surface of the wall to teach us what static electricity is. So, I drew a balloon as the player character of my game.

The game is to “rub” the objects that assigned to be the ones which can trigger and get values of static electricity on the balloon and avoid those objects which are supposed to “fail” the game. Collecting enough values and then “collide” with the door would make the balloon able to “explode” the door and then get into the next scene or get out of the room. The objects type on each side are labelled on the instruction page from the start menu. 

The development process overall is very clear, but not all smoothly completed. I laid out each step of what I should do and how should I achieve the goal at first, but the difficulties and knowledge that beyond my ability made me kept reducing my goals. The first design of the game logic is more complicated than what it turns out at the end. I hope that by studying more about Unity and C# I would gain the ability to make my first design happen. 

• Successes

I have never developed in 2D before, and this project gives me the chance to explore. The tile map and the UI system seem complicated at first, but I figured it’s quite nice and handy. The tilemap system is easy to understand how the 2D background works, and how to use some exist resources to build my own scenes. I also took some time to draw my own 2D pixel objects to use in this game both in Photoshop and Procreate on Ipad. This is a very cool artistic style for 2D games, and I would like to create more pixel elements myself in the future. 

• Failures 

There are a lot of the goals I designed in this game at first that couldn’t be achieved. Part of the reason is the time issue and most of other reasons are about my lack of knowledge on animations, value assign, and C# coding in general. I wanted to have the player only be able to pick up three items to “rub,” and each object would have different values assigned on them. The door shouldn’t be opened if the player didn’t get enough static electro values from colliding with their picked objects. But I could not figure out how to limit the selections and adding up valued as the requirement to open the door. The soundtrack also couldn’t work once I drag them into my unity game project.  

• Lessons Learned

One if the most important things I learned from developing this game is how to design my workflow first. I think it is very important to design how to work on a project before I start making. I learned how to separate each part and to make a big problem into different small ones so that I can solve the problem step by step. I figured that this is an extremely useful method in coding works. Another technique how to search on the question. Sometimes I find that I want to solve a problem or find relative tutorials for what I want to do but I don’t even know what I should put into google to find what I want. I hope with a better understand and study of C# I would be able to get better to study myself. 

• Future Development 

Animations and a more complicated game play system are my goals next. I think even very little animations on items would bring more dynamic and fun into the game.