My Personal Role: Creator (Just about everything)
Client: Columbia College Chicago(Authoring Interactive Media)
Client: Columbia College Chicago(Authoring Interactive Media)
Fixit is a simple puzzle platformer in which the player uses an options menu to change the functions of objects in the environment. They must reach the flag at the end of each level to win by turning clouds, enemies, spikes and coins into platforms for them to cross.
Players: Single Player
Controller: Mouse and Keyboard
Players: Single Player
Controller: Mouse and Keyboard
Takeaways
This project was an exercise in limitation. The engine used was called Construct 2 and the free version that the school provided us with had a number of arbitrary limitations including locking the same kind of object oriented design that was the center of a lot of our education at Columbia. In order to create the project I needed to give each object all of the functions of every one and tell it when and how to switch them. Each object exponentially increased the number of actions that needed to be attached to each one and there was a limit to how many actions the program allowed you to use as well. In the end I finally had a piece that worked something like a level editor. I could place the objects with all of their functions in any arrangement I wanted and though the requirement for the project was around five levels I could have kept crafting into hundreds with the system I had, it became a design toy rather than a programming task.
Highlights and comments
This was a very frustrating project for me. The arbitrary limitations on the program made it impossible to finish in the deadline and I ended up paying ninety dollars for the full version just to finish on time. If I had fully worked within its limitations I could only afford to have two types of objects with any function after fitting player movement and the options menu but I didn't have time to restart at that time. The restriction against creating classes for objects to inherit from also would have solved most all of my problems if I could have worked around it. Rather than redoing each object six times over with every function they could have I could have made an "object" class and had each one inherit from it. This is a project I definitely want to revisit in the future as I could easily recreate all of what I did here in unity in around three days where it took weeks with construct two.