While following the confusing controls of a classic Etch-A-Sketch, the player must navigate against the clock to pick up waves of collectibles!
Strategy Arcade Game
Desktop only
Abstract game
Graphics style - Pixel Art
Sound types - collectible pickup, board shake, UI clicks
The player will be in charge of controlling the line being drawn on the face
of the Etch-A-Sketch as well as have access to a button that "shakes" the screen
to clear the trail. This button will only be available after enough collectibles are
collected, and then it resets until more collectibles are collected later on. The player
will learn the controls at first by being tasked with navigating to 5 collectibles,
and then more will start to spawn after that initial collection.
As the screen shake/clear mechanic is introduced, the player must learn to save
clearing the screen for when it's truly needed and not waste it before the screen
gets too covered.
The controls of the game will follow the traditional Etch-A-Sketch knobs with A and D
being left and right respectively, and the left and right arrows being up and down.
I want to include an optional free draw mode which brings the player to the base
Etch-A-Sketch functionality where you can doodle with it.
My name is Amanda Rowe and I'm a Game Design and Development major at RIT. I absolutely love the problem solving and design aspects of GDD and I'm a big fan of narrative-driven and puzzle games!
For this project, I ended up changing a lot of my initial ideas when it came to functionality due to
my original idea being too difficult for both me as a programmer, and the player. Initially I wanted this game
to resemble Snake more with the idea of drawing over previous lines being a lose condition, but especially with
the confusing Etch-A-Sketch controls, I found it too difficult to play. Scrapping that idea, I instead went with
a simple collection game with a timer, which still keeps the difficulty of drawing with the controls without the
unnecessary precision needed for my previous idea.
After some peer critiques in class, I decided to stick with my timed game idea with some added visual
flair. Many people wanted to see the knobs on the Etch-A-Sketch actually spin, so I implemented that after
creating
all of my assets with PixelStudio. I also made the drawn line very slightly transparent in order to see when
it's passed
over a second time as well as gave the stars a nice fade-in effect when they spawn.
Overall, I am very proud of my final product and I think it turned out really fun to actually play. I believe
I've
met all of the project requirements when it comes to functionality, design, and good coding practices.
Fun things to note!:
- When in game mode, stars will not spawn on top of the drawn line, so the more line there is on the screen,
the less amount of stars will spawn! This creates incentive to shake the board.
- Line pixels only spawn after the cursor square has moved and less often than every frame in order to save
computing power