Hi! This blog post contains:
- Introduction to my game dev mentor
- Brief overview of the game
- Features I designed
- Things I’m happy with
- Things to improve
CLICK HERE to watch gameplay!
Dev Enabled
Firstly, credit where credit’s due: a big thank-you to my mentor Rob Brooks, alias Dev Enabled.
Rob is an absolute fantastic mentor and all-round good guy. His never-ending patience when faced with my gross ignorance and general n00b programming is astounding.
The code base on which this project was created was adapted from his “Making a 2D Platformer” course which you can watch on YouTube. Check out the first video here.
Overview of Fruit Salad
Fruit Salad is the most generic-looking 2D platformer game that you’ve ever seen. The player controls a character whose goal is to collect 8 different pieces of fruit, and avoid enemies and traps. The character can run, jump, and springboard their way to success. Bouncing off an enemy’s heads will defeat them.
This game was created using Unreal Engine 4 and blueprint, taking advantage of the Flipbook system in a 3D environment.
New features
With the base project set up (player base / enemy base / interactable base / basic environment), I added extra features and expanded the project to approximately twice the size of the original:
- 5 new enemy types – 3 land-based / 1 projectile / 1 flying
- 2 new trap types – fire / spikes
- 3 functional UI menus – main menu / win screen / lose screen
- 5 new environments
- Fresh HUD progress system – tracking the fruit collected by the player
- Core game loop
- Start / Checkpoint / Finish flags – although these didn’t make the final cut
- 1 new player animation
Things I’m happy with
- Really quick turnaround – Fruit Salad took a week to make (1/4 of the time to make my last game)
- Art and music both fit really well with the theme
- I really enjoyed working in 2D again
- Level design was really fun on this project
- In order to keep the development process moving, and actually finish the game, I forced myself to design each feature with basically correct functionality, rather than perfecting each individual thing – “it’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing”!
- It’s another finished game for the portfolio
Things to improve:
- I need to refine my work. I wanted to add more, but time / skill restraints were my limitation.
- The gameplay gets stale quickly. Nothing about it was unique. I need to start coming up with fun unique features rather than stuff we’ve all seen before.
- The end goal is to make games with C++, this project contained no original code.
If you’ve made it this far, thank-you for taking the time out of your day!
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