For the final project I ended up working with Fernan to create a platformer, beat em up style of game. I liked the idea of making something similar to the popular 90's games such as Streets of Rage, Double Dragon, or Final Fight. The end result was a playable and somewhat satisfying game, although it didn't go exactly as planned because the lack of programming knowledge. Fernan worked on the first five stages while I was supposed to work on the final 5. I ended up making one elongated stage because I wanted to stick to the side scrolling beat em up style. The plan was to have 2 bad guys and one boss character. We'd like to have a simple AI system for the bad guys and boss but couldn't get it to work. I'd watch youtube videos and attempt to copy the code. The issue comes up when I attempted to load the game. Error messages would come up and I wouldn't be able to understand why. Frustrated, I simplified everything to what we learned from the basic platformer tutorials. Instead of having the bad guys attack with some intelligence, they simply move back and forth or jumping up and down. The player can either avoid them by jumping over them, or kill them by jumping onto them. The player can also shoot the enemies if they were able to pick up a gun. The basic enemy movements resembles more of a platformer style but it does provide a challenge that will entice players to continue playing. For my final boss I added the pathfinder to make him jump back and forth. I also took the code from the 1945 side scrolling shooter and added it to my boss. So while he's jumping back and forth, he's also shooting his bullets. To make it even more difficult, he cannot be killed. The only way to beat the level is to dodge him and his bullets to make it to the exit. Using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator helped create and animate the images for this game. This part was time consuming but not difficult since I have experience using both software. What we didn't accomplish was adding HP to the bosses on characters. We couldn't figure out how to do it without conflicting with the other codes that was in place. We also planned to add a punch or kick but couldn't get that to work as well. Another important feature we'd like to have is the ability to move left, right, up, and down. There's not a lot of beginner specific tutorials that explains how to do this so we just left it out. Overall, it was a fun and frustrating project.
