Blog Post 6: Video Game Prototype


      
Our game comes under the title of Sneaky Sphinx, and is a 2d platformer where you play as Sheera, a sphinx breaking into a ruin and taking the artifact that lies within. She will have to avoid stone guardians, on the prowl and in the sky, who won't think twice about kicking her out! Confront them with your versatile wings or find a safe route around your enemies. Controls are simple: arrow keys or wasd to move and x to attack (attack has not been implemented to the build yet). 

That is the vision of the game, however so far it has only progressed art-wise, such as the enemy animations showcased above. We have major issues with setting up the enemy AI and having the camera move vertically, which is really the two big roadbloacks to constructing the levels. We also had some collision issues with the new tiles, but a little bit of tweaking seemed to fix the issue. For now, we really want to get both enemies to prowl scripted areas, but something seems to be wrong with the ground check. This will be the first thing that we look into. Our camera moves left to right, but doesn't move up and down, which really limits the level design. Getting that fixed will enable us to at the very least have an interesting level for players to jump around in. I have a thumbnail of the level in my sketchbook and if the tile issue could be fixed, we could use that to really test the look of the game.


Here you can see the enemy AI seems to have forgotten that gravity exists! Unless he's about to pull a Wile E. Coyote?

Due to the tile issues, we're still stuck with what's essentially our alpha file, with the addition of a very glitchy sentry. We're debating if we'd want to modify this file or make a new one to fix the tileset issue.

Coding problems aside, I think the game has a lot more atmosphere and personality with the background assets. I would love to make more decorations like glyphs and statues, maybe even a boss at the end of a level! We've also discussed new names for the game, and thought about the following: Tiger's Eye, Sheera's Greed, and Mammon.

~~

All art originally created.

Music used: In the Branches - Visager, obtained through freemusicarchive.org
Possible sound effects obtained from: https://opengameart.org/content/512-sound-effects-8-bit-style

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