Finishing DevLog

Over the last two months Ice cream jump has evolved from being a simple idea to a fully playable game. Many changes have been made along with healthful feedback from many testers. The games files have doubled in size as more assets are included and the playability of the game increases. This development log may be the final DevLog for UTAS KIT109, and hopefully provides a good roundup of the entire project.

Final Game vs Original Concept

Many changes have been made during the development of IceCream Jump however most are changes to design decisions that came after the initial concept. The concept document was pretty short and limited to begin with, and as such, not much has changed from that original idea. It does however, become difficult to see some of the art connections. So here is a list of differences from the concept document and the final implementation, and why they were made.

• Player art. The player art was originally going off a Super Fuzzball look, as illustrated by rushed drawings as that seemed simple to implement at the time. However, after searching Open Game Art for similar characters without finding any good matches to the concept, I decided to go with Fumiko, a character by Skoam.
• Ice cream art. The original ice cream art was designed to match the player, however after finding a good tile map and character art I decided to create the ice cream art based off the tile map art style. This was reasonably straight forward as only 16 colors are used, seemingly more colors were created with checkerboard looks, that were smoothed out with the bi-linear sprite rendering.

Feedback and observations

Feedback and continual testing is an important part for many games, and IceCream jump is no different. Changes based on user feedback and observations on play style were prevalent throughout the games design and production, from difficulty to controls and level design. Full details can be found in the various weekly devlogs and the game testing week. As a quick summary here are the ones that stand out:

• Jump height with wall collision. Some of the first play tests of the first prototype, I observed some people were jumping into the side of walls and loosing vertical velocity as a result, making it significantly more finicky to move around the level. To fix this I modified the player movement code to apply a zero friction material to the player whenever they jumped, and added the normal physics material back when the hit level ground again. This way, when the player jumped into a wall, they would continue vertically along the wall to the same height as jumping on the spot.
• Colors and colorblindness. For a game based on interactions with different objects that are identified by their colors, it becomes very important to make sure these colors are distinguishable to as many people as possible. One particularly difficult set of colors were an orange and green on the right side of level 3. Thanks to good feedback in the game testing session, I went about changing the saturation and lightness of each to make them visually distinguishable to this kind of color blindness.
• Difficulty. Difficulty was an ongoing variable that continually benefited from various tweaks and adjustments, generally in the direction of making that level slightly easier, and removing the need for fine adjustments by the player. This was usually done by changing the wait times on the hands, however improving the playability was mostly done with small level changes, like removing annoying corners in various places.

These are only the three biggest problems that standout, a more comprehensive list can be found in the game testing week.

Asset List

Various assets were used throughout the game, however kept to a minimum. This game is made with Unity Engine. Here is a complete list of all the assets:

Player Guide

An in depth player guide is available in a separate devlog here: User Guide