Contributions to Construct 2 Game Project

We brainstormed on a few ideas and decided to go for one of the suggestions I made, which is a racing/platformer game that is inspired by karapan sapi, a traditional race from Madura. Unfortunately, Construct 2 is only compatible with Windows, hence Callista was not able to contribute much in writing the functionalities. Thus my task was more focused on the functionalities of the game while Callista’s was the design of the game. Of course there are some things that needed to be done together because it requires the understanding of how Construct 2 takes sprites/objects and how we should design the sprites so Construct 2 is able to render our design correctly. A perfect example of this was the making of our own sprite font because the default sprite font did not aesthetically go well together with our game, so we had no choice but to make our own.

For this project, everything is original except for the sound effects/music and the font. We realised that in order to be consistent in the game’s art style and for the sprites to look how we envisioned, we had to design everything from scratch. I designed the cow sprite and the background and I did some touch ups and gave insights for some of the sprites that Callista designed.

Regarding the functionalities of the game, Callista helped in giving me resources to look through when I encountered issues. I learned how important it is to be descriptive when communicating certain issues because by being able to do so, resulted in Callista finding resources that exactly solves the issue I face when coding. I had issues with the behaviour of the player because it wasn’t exactly a platformer although it looks like it is. I had to implement the 8-Direction behaviour on the player, and this was one of the initial issues that occured and we were still open to changes. We tested using platformer behaviour but it wasn’t acting how we envisioned so we sticked to 8-Direction behaviour, which is an interesting take because there is no jump mechanism implemented in Construct 2. Hence, what happened was that it wasn’t really jumping, it was just an animation trick by placing the origin at a different spot for each frame. This took a lot of thinking as there weren’t any tutorials on the internet and only a simple hint in a forum. That was the most memorable learning moment that happened in the project. Since I was the only one who coded, I of course in majority contributed to the coding, however Callista helped in giving ideas on certain events as well.

Game Proposal

In Semeseter 2, our Multimedia and HCI’s final project is to create a game using Construct 2 with the theme being Indonesia. Hence, Callista and I are working together to create a racing/platformer game inspired by the traditional annual race in Madura called, “Karapan Sapi”.

As mentioned, it’s a platformer action game. Our player, controls a cow and race other racers. The player will have to avoid obstacles by jumping over them. There will be boosters the user can buy from in the shop menu to aid them for their next race. This means that the game requires a currency system that also acts as the reward system. If the character wins first place, they will earn the highest reward possible in that level, being in third place means a game over and requires the player to replay that level.