Their story, in their words…
What is my game
My game is a multilevel platformer game that allows you to choose from 3 different characters with different abilities depending on who you choose. The game features a variety of environments and enemies to change up gameplay and improve user experience.
Difficulties
By far the biggest difficulty I faced during this project was navigating the various documentation of Flutter. Flutter is an up and coming framework that is being used more and more throughout the tech industry especially for mobile apps. Due to how new it is and how rapidly it develops, documentation from a year ago could be invalid and you have to figure out how the code works on your own. Alongside this, getting certain elements such as character and level selection to work alongside with hitbox detection posed its own set of challenges to face as many errors arise when programming. One example being finding a solution to when a player character may have multiple collisions at the same time and instead of dropping as they should getting stuck on an object. Integrating different character abilities into the game posed its own set of problems as it causes so many new interactions to be made that cause a whole new set of bugs.
In order to properly test my game I would need to use emulators available to simulate a phone to be able to properly test the game and finding a computer that would be able to run both the game and emulator smoothly at the same time for testing proved to be difficult at points but through some assistance I was able to figure out a solution by being able to find devices capable of running the game.
My thoughts on the project
Overall, I am happy with how the game turned out. I have done many programming projects in the past however I had never actually been able to create something like a mobile app and be able to publish it online. Despite many difficulties faced throughout the project I was able to finish it regardless and have a completed product. During development I received lots of tester feedback that greatly affected development by seeing what people enjoyed and what they thought could be better such as differing enemy mechanics across levels as previously enemies were very similar but then got their own attacks to vary gameplay.
Some things I would have liked to include were potential multiplayer compatibility but that posed too great a challenge and unfortunately got scrapped as an idea. But that may just be something I include in future projects instead
Having done this project now I would love to continue making projects like this in future after improving my skills and finding people to work alongside me.
Skills
Being able to learn a new framework has been a lot of fun and a great experience through this project as this has both improved my knowledge of programming but my skill set too. This project gave me new insight into what game development as a whole is like in various aspects such as taking player feedback and applying it, asset design, programming and level design. Since the enemies use their own AI I improved my skills in both developing game AI and implementing it to the game will be great help in future projects that I will do.
