Wildlife & Animals!

Inspiration for this game comes from a variety of different games, tv shows and movies in the industry along with wildlife and animals in general.

The main inspiration for Walter the Penguin is obviously from animals and wildlife in general with both developers interest in documentaries featuring animals. Baring animals in mind, when trying to develop the idea of using a Penguin as a main character in our game we typically thought about the environment as a whole.

Therefore, we thought of different world climates and seasons;

Summer/ Warmth & Deserts
Winter/ Cold & Snow
Autumn/ Fall & Leaves/ The Harvest
Spring/ Easter & Rabbits

There were various different ideas that appeared as inspiration towards our game but as this game is being created around the Autumn and into the Winter time, we decided to go with a Penguin and the environment is a cold Antarctic environment featuring a lot of snow, ice and complimentary winter assets.

When developing a game, you want the player to have an experience that they will remember. The game will contain mediocre yet extremely difficult jumps making it hard for the player to either reach a certain fish or actually complete the level. Not only will the difficulty make the player wanting to play more, but the overall art style chosen may. For the game, we decided to take a cartoon and pixel art approach making it have a more classic feeling to the players eye in hope that it will intrigue the player more and make them want to play more through the use of colours and the overall design itself.

The overall theme decided for Walter's Winterous Adventures will be Christmas/ winter. The decided theme for the game originated from the main character, Walter the Penguin which then followed with the habitat in which penguins live in. Along with this, as the game was being developed around the winter seasons we sprouted from that idea as well. The overall gameplay will be based around the snowy winter seasoned mountains, where Walter the Penguin must fill his appetite with delicious fish to let him continue his journey as he wants.

On a technical and coding aspect, Walter's Winterous Adventure contains a lot of different HTML and JavaScript files with the game that tie everything together appropriately. The game itself follows a certain procedure in order for the player to navigate to the actual game guiding through different game states as follows;

The game itself will always following this certain structure giving the player the ability to reach the certain point at the end or die by falling of the map or failing a certain jump. The level itself will conclude whenever either of these events happen.

Throughout the development of Walter's Winterous Adventure, there were some game features that were implemented to the game to make it more enthralling for the player. A feature that was added was the ability to let the player collect the different collectables. There will be fish collectables throughout the level appropriately and through the game difficulty it will make some easy to collect and some difficult involving a risk of death and restarting the level all over again.

The player mechanics throughout the game will be fairly simple and will be similar to your basic platformers available in the games industry today. It will feature basic left and right movement mechanics with the implementation of sprite animations using a character sprite sheet followed by a simple jumping mechanic allowing the player to complete its aim and objective to finish the game.

In every game, it is more or less routine and part of the overall design of a game to make a user interface, construct an appropriate level design and allow the player to interact with appropriate objects. On top of this you must use appropriate and well designed art assets to compliment the game itselt and make appealing to the players eye.

User Interface Design
When the development of the user interface began for the game Walter’s Winterous Adventure, it was decided that the overall design of the interface would be focused around a web type game/ cartoon style interface. Creating a light hearted interface with a cartoon style would be more suitable to a web based game that something that was made for a 3D environment. The entire user interface was created by Jason Alexander. The overall design and completion of the interface took about one week of work in order to implement all ideas into the interface. When creating the title screen for the game, it was important to have a design that made sense to the game that was being created. Since Walter’s Winterous Adventure is based on winter climate, the idea of designing the user interface around winter came up. Since the interface will be designed around the wintery theme, it will be important to make sure that the focus remains on the text on the screen and not what is going on in the background. The title of the game and the options on the title screen should be the main focus of the player, the main focal point. The background graphics should be less of a focal point for the player and not stand out as much. For the text for the title screen, especially the game title, creating a style that represented a cold, almost ice type look to the text to represent the harsh cold of winter.

The creation of the controls screen was very simple as there really aren’t many controls to use within the game Walter’s Winterous Adventure. There are basic left and right keys in order to move the player around the designated map as well as a keyboard key to make the character jump within the game. Everything within the user interface was created in Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 using various tools such as the pen tool to create the hills shown in the background. The interface was made to fit a scale of 800x600 size game window.

Level Design
The creation of the level in Walter's Winterous Adventure was created in an application called Tiled. Tiled is a tile map editor created by Thorbjørn Lindeijer that allows developers to create their own maps through free and easy to use software. For this game, we create the entire level design in tiled and then took the exported file format over to then implement into our code appropriately. Throughout the level it will contain all the art assets created for the game and will feature various paths for the player to go to collect the collectables making it more difficult for the player. The following art assets are the assets that were all created by a member of this group and were added appropriately to the game.

Walter the Penguin

Fish

Snow Tiles

Player Interaction
Throughout the level in Walter's Winterous Adventure, the player collides with various different tiles. Once the tile map has been created it was exported over into the code itself where the further development for the collision began giving us the opportunity to make the player collide as it would be needed. As the player progresses, they will obviously collide with the several tiles around the map but will also collide with other objects such as the fish that will be placed in certain places, some harder than others, around the level appropriately. There will be a certain amount of fish that can be collected but not all have to be appropriately collected in order for the player to complete the game. On top of this, there will be various consequences set out for the player throughout the game. This will involve the implementation of the level difficulty and jumping, as this will make certain jumps from one platform to another harder as you progress through and failing to make this jump may or may not mean that the player must start the level from scratch. At this moment in the game, there will be no life system throughout the game but will just be implemented that the player will restart the level completely as it raises the difficulty.