Over the last 2 weeks, I along with a partner, designed and developed Go Go Granny! My role in this assignment was the programmer, and my partner was the artist. From the programming side, there were a couple of big obstacles to overcome. Firstly, this game is supposed to be infinitely generating with randomly appearing obstacles. From a programmers point of view, this is challenging, because writing code that could theoretically go on forever seems daunting. However, once I got used to Gamemaker: Studio (the software used to develop this game), this task was easily accomplished. By using a series of timers, I was able to create infinitely generating random landscape. The second big obstacle was balancing an infinite game. As the game progresses, it needs to become more difficult, or else it will bore the players. This task was handled by using a level up system based off of the distance you traveled. As you go further and further, the game will speed up to compensate for your progress. With the core gameplay handled, the next step was to have other people test our game.
During class, we had half the students rotating around the classroom testing players games. When they tested our game, we made sure to ask them if the physics seemed fair, and if the cookie worked well. We learned two things from these tests: The cookies can be too hard to see, and the enemy is too fast. Some suggestions we had were to implement an eating animation for when the enemy caught the cookie, to slow the enemy more when he had a cookie, and to change the color of the cookie or fence to be more clear.
These fixes will be implemented in a future version of Go Go Granny!
If you wish to play the prototype version, you can download it from this link. (This version is ONLY playable on Windows machines).
