ShroomMage

As the Player, you are Mage Shroom, a powerful source of power summoned by the Mother Shroom (The Big Blue Mushroom).  As your sorcerer, you must protect Her at all costs or else, the forest will decay.  Prevent being touched by the waves of virus-blobs and kill them to prevent them from spreading. Their sole purpose is to kill Mother Shroom. Fortunately, To survive, explore the world, pick up flowers to heal, pick up bushes to enhance your Mother Shroom, and pick up shrooms to enhance yourself.

Project Inspiration

For a long time, I have wanted to make a turf war game inspired by how Mushrooms in the biological world behave. Funghi indeed is a fundamental aspect of the forest, because even though most of it is unseeable because it is overground, they are responsible for keeping the forest alive.  Its underground mycelium network sends information and nutrients to different parts of the forest to keep it alive and healthy. They also decay dead things really fast, allowing other species to grow or survive. Protecting Mushrooms would therefore mean protecting the forests too. The enemies of my game come from the idea that Mushrooms can cure infections, diseases and viruses.

Project Idea

As my first 2D game, I wanted to make a point-and-shoot since aiming requires skill. When I started  I created a character, who would shoot projectiles yet did not hold a gun. Therefore, the theme of my project arose: protecting nature. Nature is really hard to graphically represent because it is full of repetitive patterns and complexities. Therefore the Theme Style I chose was a top-down pixelated world, in which the player, also known as ShroomMage, has to explore the forest and pick up shrooms, flowers and bushes. However, I swarm of blobs will continually spawn in the form of waves, making the game increasingly harder. If the blobs touch you they will kill you, but most importantly they will kill MotherShroom. In this game, MotherShroom is the tower you have to defend in a tower defence game. Its health bar is displayed at the top of the player's screen, and in the corner of the screen there is a minimap displaying MotherShroom so that if it is attacked, you would know. If MotherShroom dies you die, therefore you must explore the forest and pick up flowers to heal, bushes to protect MotherShroom, and tiny Mushrooms to gain powers. Finally, get the highest score possible by killing enemy blobs.

Challenges

Being my first game to ever complete, I met with so many challenges like learning how tilemaps work, how sprites work, how Ienumarators work, yielded returns, animations, UI elements, sprite renderers, player movement, player pointing and shooting, Healthbar UI’s, and many more. The most complicated challenge for m though was time, because you could do anything if you had the time in the universe. But of course, we do not have all the time in the world, therefore I had to manage my time properly. I started early for that reason and worked every week since I started, giving myself breaks in between weeks. Regardless, I found myself spending so much time learning certain aspects, or debugging others, that in future projects I am eager to use my time wiser. By the end of the project timeline, I wanted more and more time and kept implementing more and more stuff to better the experience in my game. However, I learned very profoundly that I have just started my Game Development career, I have too much time on my hands to keep making more and more games, better and better. And as a first project, I am proud. 

User Testing

My game went through millions of game-testing iterations. Of course, many of those iterations were mine, but they allowed me to balance the game as much as possible. However, the other half of User Tests, were by my friends and people living with me. Every single piece of feedback they gave me, I took into consideration, to make sure the user experience was fun, non-stressful and smooth. The name of the game changed between ShroomMage and MageShroom several times, the font colours and theme styles have also changed due to that. I started finding that the game is hard, therefore players like my girlfriend that are not used to keyboard games, can find it really hard to get the hang of it, and the tree’s collision boxes made it really hard to explore and navigate the map, therefore I deleted them. Other users wanted more feedback to know what they were doing, therefore I implemented more visual and sound effects to enhance the experience, without taking away the exploring aspect of the game. I did realize that people were less inclined to explore and more included to just shoot enemies, but I rely on the fact that they play 1 to 3 times in order to get the hang of it.  

References:

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