Postmortem

Ex-Machina the 2D side scrolling, platformer based around the film Ex-Machina is now finished, and was quite successful in my opinion!

Key features:

While the game may not have had an incredible level of polish for users, the technical implementations were quite good! The game showcased:

- A Level editor that was created through reading in external .txt files

- A fleshed out Highscore system, based on quality of gameplay. The time of completion for a level, collectables collected etc.

- Basic animation cycles for the player Avatar

The level editor was the most impressive technical implementation in the project. It allowed the whole group to work on level design at the same time, by simply editing .txt files (pic 2). Where there was a 0, a background sprite was rendered, a 1 was a floor tile, a 2 was a double jump tile, and a 3 meant a speed debuff. When it came time for playtesting and level design, this system saved the team a lot of time!

The sprite animation created by Luke were a great part of the game, that through playtesting we found played quite well and had a positive impact on the players. We had a different character sprite for each level to symbolise the AI (the playable character) getting smarter (similar to the film). As well as this we had a death screen showing Nathan, the antagonist from the film, laughing manically. This created frustration for the player and helped to increase replayability.

Future Plans:

Any future plans would involve editing the player controller to function smoother, as at the moment the jumping in the game can feel slightly floaty, and so requires a bit of tweaking. As well, any further development would see us create more levels for the game, with perhaps a wider variety of powerups to help and hinder the player.