Game development process

Throughout the game development process, we started with brainstorming the background story of the game so that we can follow a consistent theme over the entire game. Our theme came out to be a prince trying to escape from a princess that he doesn’t love yet he was assigned to marry to. 

We then dive into the sprite design of the characters, monsters, as well as the sprites of different platforms and materials. We used an online sprite editor tool called piskel to make the designing process lighter and we can focus more on the level design. In this editor, we also created the animation sprites for our character and monsters to be used in the game.

In parallel to the artwork, we developed the first 2 easy levels as well as a start and game over screen as our first prototype to receive feedback on. One of the feedback we got from this version was: give the main character/prince a defensive action since he is running away. We ended up not taking that suggestion and instead we decided to have the prince shoot gold coins, so as to convey the story of the prince paying the princess’ servants to get away from them. Another feedback was to add sprites to our prototyped enemies in the 2 levels, as we only had a red circle to represent the monster. The monsters were added later in our beta version.

For the beta version, we had 4 levels (2 easy, 1 medium, and 1 hard) done with texture, background, and music in the hard level. In the newly added 2 levels, we added more monsters with various categories and we also made the map of the new levels bigger to increase the difficulty of them. On this version, we received more feedback. Some of them are on the bugs of the game and some others are suggestions of changes we can make to our game. For example, there was a lost frame when the prince was shooting coins, causing the prince to disappear momentarily. Another bug was the height of jumping of the prince was not limited, causing the prince to elevate directly to the next level gate instead of traversin the map in some of the levels. Some of the changes we can consider making was modifying some monsters to make them look more dangerous. Another one was to adjust the difficulty of the levels so that it is not insanely difficult to beat. 

In the final version, we were able to fix all the bugs in the game. We also made slight changes to the monsters’ design to make sure people know they are not helpful items to collect. The game difficulty was decreased by making the map smaller and removing some monsters in some of the levels. We also added another winning screen when the player clears the game. Therefore, the game is now considered complete.