Forest Escape

Overall Vision:

Summary:

As a throwback and reminder of traditional computer video games from the early 2000s. “Forest Escape” is a survival/action/adventure game, in which the hero must make it through all the different levels of the game, eliminating his enemies, and collecting the power rings that appear before him to escape the forest. Only by accomplishing all of these tasks, will the hero be able to escape, survive, and overall conquest his adventure.

Genre:

Forest Escape can be mainly classified as an E-rated fictional action video game. As the controls and objectives of the game are simple, yet entertaining enough, to allow both young or old audiences to play through it and enjoy it easily.

Target Audience:

As the game would receive a rating of E given the practical controls and overall objective that the game has. I would primarily say that the target audience for it would be kids and teens from ages 6 – 15 that enjoy playing not so challenging video games and are looking to have some fun.

Mechanics of the Game:

Character’s Goal:

As previously mentioned, the primary objectives the hero in this game must achieve is successfully defeating all enemies (monsters) throughout all the levels, and collect the power rings to escape the forest successfully.

Abilities:

The main skills the hero character has on this game is access to multiple types of movement behaviors, mainly platform movements. Allowing him to walk or run in any direction and jump to other platforms to be able to reach his enemies. Furthermore, the character has a unique attack ability when pressing the A key, which needs to hold down to kill the enemies he encounters.

Obstacles:

The most challenging obstacles in the game are in both making sure that the player is holding down the A key when attacking the enemies to defeat them, as well as making sure to use the jump key in the right moment to be able to make it across the map of each level.

Items:

The only real element present in this game are the rings of power that only appear after every enemy in each level has been defeated. Without successfully defeating all enemies on each level, the player will not be able to collect the necessary rings to move to the next level, and ultimately, escape the forest and win.

Resources:

While the player is already fitted with a sword he can use to attack his enemies, he must still worry about not depleting all of his health points to be able to survive each level and collect all rings to make it to the next one. If the player is not able to defeat all of the monsters while also making sure his health points do not get depleted, then the rings of power will not appear, and the level will be automatically reloaded to try once again.

Dynamics of the Game:

UI (User Interaction):

As the instructions in the title of the game explain, the entire game is controlled through the use of the four arrow keys to determine the movement and jumping of the player in the video game, with the use of the A key in order to activate the attack of the character as well.

Proficiency:

The main proficiencies that players will most likely face with the game is matching the attack of the hero character to his enemies to defeat them. Nevertheless, the controls of the game can, at times, also be quite sensible, which could also cause the movement of the character to be challenging to control. Nevertheless, there is still a rather ample gap of time a player has to accurately control the movement of the character and successfully navigate each level.

Gameplay Data:

As seen in the game, the only statistic that is shown throughout each of the levels is the health icon in the upper left corner of the game, where the health of the character is tracked at each level.

Controlling the Game:

From the very start of the title page of the game, the way in which the entire game begins is by making contact with the first enemy that appears, which then takes the player immediately to the first level of the video game. Once the player reaches the first level, there is no way of going back to the title menu or advancing to other levels unless the objectives are met, and the hero character progresses through to the next level and ultimately reaches the ending of the game where he must once again collect the final sword in the end to display the final credits of the game.

Aesthetics of the Game:

Overall:

The entire aesthetic of the game is to evoke a sense of adventure, bravery, and daring by incorporating the background of a semi-dark forest the player must travel through. It is balanced enough so as not to cause or provoke a sense of fear in people that play the game, but also want them to play through the game and conquer it.

Game art:

Using mainly pixellated game assets and background, the game has a sort of retro aspect to it as it reminds people of early types of video games.

Sound:

Blades and Battles make the entire soundtrack of the game, evoking an emotion of medieval knights or crusaders who bravely encountered dangerous situations and yet still emerged victorious from them.

Plot:

The hero character needs to successfully and skillfully escape the forest in order to reach his destination so as to be safe.

Emotional State:

A sense of true adventure and braveness is what this game wants its players to be able to experience. By the use of darker and cooler colors, as well as the accompaniment of medieval soundtracks, and the diverse color palette of the hero. Players will get to experience a sense of adventure and desire to play this character in order to make it out safely of the forest.

Fun:

The main gratification the game will offer will be in the defeat of the enemies the hero must face, as well as the collection of the rings of power, and the award of a legendary sword at the end along with riches to celebrate the safe escape from the forest.

Credits

The main game assets I utilized in the creation of this game came from the ichio.io and Kenney websites, by using free game asset content offered in both sites.

In this case, The Hero character (Animated Pixel Adventurer), Enemies (Free Platformer Assets), Swords and Rings (16×16 Item Pack), Soundtrack (Blades and Battles), as well as the Background Art (Free Pixel Art Forest) were all assets downloaded directly from ichio.io through free downloadable content. While the tiles (Building Expansion) I utilized for the game, were downloaded from Kenney.

Reflection

Overall,  my experience while creating this game was a challenging one, mainly due to the lack and beginner experience that I had in using Construct 3. The biggest challenges I yet found myself having to deal with throughout the entire creation of my game was figuring out how to properly use instance variables to allow certain events and items actually to appear or happen, and even still I was not able to fully understand or solve some of those problems. Likewise, understanding and figuring out how to correctly add the music soundtrack that I wanted for my game was also problematic. While I would have loved to add a sound animation to my character, I decided against it due to specific problems that I was unable to resolve for it. Furthermore, another of my biggest challenges was solving the problem I continuously faced in finding ways to not overlap the different player boxes I created for my hero for the various actions he would take in either destroying his enemies or his enemies hurting him. To fix this problem, I had to create several player boxes for both my hero and its enemies so that either when the hero was attacking the enemy, he would be destroyed, or when the hero would not attack the enemy, he would get hurt. As such, while creating this game has most certainly been one of the most challenging projects I have made. I am still proud and happy for the game I have created, I think in many ways it reflects the style and genre of game I was aiming for, and I think the aesthetics and feel that the game evokes in players is the one I wanted it to offer to people. I would, however, have liked to change one or two aspects of the game, perhaps in changing the background of the different levels as the player progresses and possibly expanding the map so that the player can have more extensive experience while playing my game. Nevertheless, I am pleased with the way the game was able to come out in the end, and hopefully, other people that play it might have the same opinion about it. For the final project of this class, however, I am considering using YouTube tutorials in how to create a game for Construct 3, as I am very much a visual learner and I feel that video tutorials are very helpful to me in figuring out how to use a program and as such model different project ideas so that I am actually able to create them. As of yet, I am not set on any particular plan for my next project, but I hope that as I go through this tutorial, my knowledge and experience with Construct 3 might improve and make the future experience of creating my final game less stressful and frustrating for me.