Marvin’s Day Off is an arcade style game, where players must run around a city trying to get objects, while dodging vehicles. I created the game in Fall of 2012 as a solo project for my advanced seminar in Montreal.
INSPIRATIONS:
The big inspiration for Marvin’s Day Off came from my life. Growing up and living in and around cities such as New York City, Boston, and Montreal, I remember moving around the streets of cities, moving across streets when traffic was down, even during red lights. When thinking about it, I thought that the actions of deciding when its safe to cross and when its not safe to cross made for an interesting game idea, and decided to pursue it.
DESIGN:
The basic principle behind the game is simple. Players control a man doing errands in a city. They must find pick-ups and collect them without getting hit by cars and other vehicles. As the player picks up objects, they fall in line behind him and add a certain amount of time to the clock, and the game ends when either the timer reaches 0, or a car hits the player or a pick-up they have gotten. In order to create this project, I needed to make a project proposal, which outlined my ideas, such as the mechanics, aesthetics, and narrative of the game, as well as the technological risks of the project and my goals for each of the milestones that would come.
After each milestone, I would re-evaluate the goals I had set in the previous milestone. Depending on what got accomplished and what did not, I would change the goals of the next milestone to better suit the needs of the project. This updating of goals lead me to better detail what needed to be done on the project, and lead me to have better goals moving forward.
Part of thought in making the game was to create something simple, so that I would be able to accomplish my goals. When creating the game area, I constructed a small rectangular area that the player could move around in, showing the boundaries with a fog. I then created a city grid, with several rows of traffic on the left/right axis, and less going up and down. I decided to only have one way lanes, with different lanes moving in different directions. Between the lanes of traffic, I created sidewalks and buildings, further creating the city. I then populated the city with different vehicles, the pick-ups, and Marvin himself. I made Marvin and the pick-ups more colorful than most of the other objects in the game, which are usually a darker color or common color like white, so that the player can easily recognize them in the city.
Going into the project, my greatest concern was working in Unity, as I was just beginning to learn Unity and C# at the start of the term. I was concerned that I would run into problems and wouldn’t be able to solve them. And run into problems I did. One problem that plagued the game during the first milestone was a problem where the size of my pick-ups would grow, to the point at which they would cause the player to lose the game. I was eventually able to find the answer to my growing pick-up problem, but I soon find a new issue. When i tried to implement random spawning of the pick-ups, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t delete pick-ups that tried to spawn inside of buildings, and if pick-ups spawned in buildings, the game couldn’t progress. I came across a revelation as how to solve this predicament just before I went to bed one night. I wrote the information down on a piece of paper, and when I woke up, I read the piece of paper, went to the computer to work on my project, and created a solution to the problem within 10 minutes.
While working on the game, I also had to create an analysis of the market. I looked at several other games with similar controls, designs, and goals, and used them to see what those games did well, and what I wanted to do differently from those games.
POSTMORTEM:
Overall, I learned a lot from doing this project, in terms of design, scope, programming, and problem solving. I was able to get nearly everything I wanted to get done for my milestones, and each time, got back some important feedback on how I could better improve the project. I was also able to find ways of solving the problems that presented themselves that I had no idea when starting the project would be problems. Most of the things that went wrong during the project, like the growing problem and the pick-ups in building problem, I was able to figure out a way to solve the problem. However, some problems still eluded solving. One example of this was the issue of colliding cars. I had tried to get my cars, when they were about to collide, to get one to stop, wait a few seconds, and then keep going. However, I was unable to get the programming to work correctly, even though to the best of my knowledge it should work. I also received feedback at my last milestone that my game could use more balancing in terms of where the pick-ups spawn and how fast the cars move. In hindsight, I agree with the feedback, and have begun working on ways to better balance the game. Overall, I felt that I was able to get a majority of what I wanted to get accomplished done. I was able to create a functioning game, solve issues as they arose, and learned a lot about programming and game development. Though some issues still remain, such as balancing issues and colliding cars, I hope to be able to eventually solve these problems and further improve this game, and perhaps one day create more mechanics for the game itself.