GAME JAM: DAY TWO

This week’s jam theme over at WeeklyGameJam is titled Don’t Touch It! and I’m going to attempt an entry in just a few days. Here is my progress after day two.

The list I gave myself for today consisted of title screen, scoring system and background graphics so I prioritised these over any other ideas I have for the game.

In order to design a title screen I first needed a name for the game. As the game itself is nice and simple, I decided to name it in similar fashion and just called it Circles. I was able to use existing assists to put together a title screen and play button.

I built several background ideas but the one I found worked best were randomly moving squares present in the background during game play. However I also found they added to the title screen too, making it more eye catching so here they appear too.

One problem I did find during testing was that as soon as you pressed the Play button you launched straight into the game. So I added a three second countdown to prepare the player and this works really well whilst adding to the look and feel of the game.

With two out of the three points successfully completed, I got to work on the scoring system. This I knew would be the most time consuming point of all. As the better player will be surviving the longest in the game it made sense to have a scoring system based around a time. Timers are easy enough to integrate into any game but for some reason I really struggled with displaying the score in the desired font and working it into the Game Over screen. Managed it after a couple of drinks and I think it looks great, even if you score badly.

Finally, with the game nearing completion I added a couple of sounds to both the starting and finishing screens as well as a tiny sound clip to indicate to the player that the click is ticking.

PLAY THE GAME HERE

It’s actually nice to have the time to take part in events such as this. I’m pleased with the way I can quickly prototype and idea and improving on this skill will not only ensure that the quality of my work improves but also a quicker turnaround will allow me more opportunities to enter more game jams in future without the worry of time constraints.