Mang is going to school

Design Process

I wanted to build a game that was reflective of my childhood and also current situation. I decided to try a version of an old game I used to remember playing (barely) called bobby is going home. My twist is that I am doing the opposite and going to school. I started with a story board of me going home earlier this year but then after talking to Bolor about the idea it made more sense that I was going back to school. Especially since I was using tools I learnt during class to try and build this game. In that way it is a journey back to school, and it is set up in 3 stages. The journey starts with crossing a bridge, then taking a flight and a fast and bumpy ride back into the city. I wanted to use some functions of the program to help the main character to navigate through obstacles. I had hope for this to be a learning game for beginners. My vision was that it would get more and more complicated. I wanted to find backdrop of a cityscape but didnt manage to find a free one. Maybe I will try to make my own as I tweak this later. I feel like I might have bit off more than I can chew. Though the game is coming along there are quite a few tweaks that I will need to do. A major issues I kept having was figuring out collisions, although I understand how it is suppose to work I have issues putting it in practice. Embarassingly large amount of hours got wasted on these. I think I have to figure out a technique that would make sense for me. I started off with a drawingboard and tried to figure out as much details as I could, the I moved on to sketches on p5.js. This took the most amount of time which in hindsight was a mistake. I need to just make sure the concept would translate on paper but got caught up trying to make the whole thing happen. A valuable but frustrating lesson. When I moved on to the graphics, things started to move smoother. It was easy to make sense of issues and characteristics of the game. My approach is so broad that I had issues trying to narrow it, I like the concept but would have to tweak the approach.

inspiration- Bobby is going home, Atari