How to make my first videogame
First, happy new year, everyone!
This blog was hoping that it would be a Christmas special between me and rice for our followers, but faced with certain complications, the best thing to do was to upload it on New Years. Consider it a gift:
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Since my collaboration with Rice in the blog above 👆, I wondered how difficult it would be for the professional from a field other than informatics to learn the complete development of a video game. Investigating on this same platform, I was able to find the following blog published by the user Néstor Adrián Balich on the PuzzleScript platform. As a quick introduction, it’s a page for creating puzzle-themed video games.
In my case, I admit that I did not have any programming knowledge; However, this was not a problem thanks to the fact that I began to review the work of other users, and learn what kind of actions the different applied codes could generate.
After learning enough about what kind of interactions the different codes generated, I started my self-proposed challenge of creating a video game.
The idea of the video game was not very clear, so I thought that maybe in the publications of my already mentioned friend (Rice) I came up with an idea of having the character “Quackers” as the main character of the story.
Of course, I didn’t know anything about programming, but I did know about video games, so I included “rice” as an object to pick up in certain regions of the game, so that in this way there would be an incentive on the maps that would motivate the player to move towards these areas. In addition to a square that will indicate to the player where to continue the adventure.
Writing the story was the easiest part of the entire development, because being such a short game, the seriousness of a complex story would not fit, so simplicity was necessary. Still, the game is divided into 4 sections, in which you can find a Boss at the end of each one.
In the first part, the selected Boss was a colossal squid, where the tentacles chase Quackers.
In the second part, the selected Boss was a snake. I programmed this Boss with random movements, except when Quackers was in a straight line, either horizontal or vertical, in which case, the snake moved in the straight line defined by the player.
In the third part, it was more difficult to agree on a Boss, I ended up deciding on a plant that moves on its roots and attacks by throwing its petals. Which can be deflected by the ambient wind.
In the fourth and last part, the chosen Boss was a dragon that instead of attacking, you have to run away from it, dodging its flames, during an important section of the level.
As you may notice, in the dragon section, the player does not control Quackers, but the partner that appears in the second Boss. I invite the player to play and discover this adventure in which I put a lot of effort :)
I do not do this blog with the aim of showing off the final product of my project, not even to make my “talent” notice, because as I already said, this is what I would consider my first official video game.
My goal is actually to point out that despite the fact that the world of programming is too broad for some, in the end many people have already ventured into this vast universe and forged tools that allow us to enter more easily. In the end, nothing is complicated if one is encouraged to ask for help.
And you may be wondering: What does all this have to do with paleontology?
It is no secret to anyone that the world “evolution” faster thanks to the power of technology and although it is true that we are not yet ready to separate ourselves from our nature, we have already become so tied to technology that we cannot get rid of it either. The latter, therefore, it is necessary to understand technology as much as to understand nature to adapt to changes in the world.
If you reached the end of the blog, I invite you to try the video game, which you can find in Rice’s blogs, and you can also find the codes to see in detail how the project was programmed. Stay tuned for our post :)
