Project Description

”Please Last 10 seconds.”  was developed under the prompt of a “10 seconds” gameplay type game. Harris and Michelle’s inspiration came from our love for playing challenging games that require quick reflexes like “I Wanna Be The Boshy” and the “LoL Dodge Game”, stemming from our addiction to League of Legends (a.k.a. LoL). Following up on Harris’ admiration for “Neo-Tokyo” aesthetics, we aimed for a digital, training simulation game feel.

What Went Right

We believe we sold the aesthetic package pretty well, it was actually the first thing we thought of after settling on the game idea of dodging and surviving for 10 seconds. And since we only had one week to complete this project, we were quick to decide on making a 2D game with pixel-aesthetics, which would tie in easily with the whole “simulation” theme anyways. We were able to strongly develop our idea when Harris prototyped particles shooting out of a single point, the “enemy” or training bot, in a pyramid-like manner and rolled onto making rings of particles shooting out from the training bot. During those first days, Michelle created a character model and continued working on the aesthetics of the game. The last days we worked together to tidy-up UI elements, music & sounds and the main menu.

What Went Wrong

Despite tackling and finishing a game with the given time frame of one week, I believe we did a pretty good job overall. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement. In order to make the game more dynamic, more enemy AI needs to be implemented. “I Wanna Be The Boshy” is a great example for us to learn from, the variety of enemy actions resulted in less predictable patterns which translates into more compelling and challenging gameplays. But of course, they have a much longer development time frame and a much bigger team. “Please Last 10 Seconds” is a fairly challenging game to new players and those that aren’t familiar with MOBAs, and players will experience death a lot in the game which is part of the challenge in reaching the end goal, that is, to survive for 10 seconds. During our playtest and presentation, we received feedback from professionals on our restart design; the restarting process should feel less punishing and a lot quicker than having to click on the “restart” button every time the player dies. This is something we could easily change to a keypress or automatic restart. 

What We Learned

During the early stage of the development, Harris had noticed a character control issue: a simple addForce() jump couldn’t satisfy the dynamics of the gameplay. Harris then looked into the mechanics of one of the most classic platform games - Mario bros. The longer the jump button is pressed, the longer the character stays in the air. The jump arch differentiates from the keypress time, and this could result in a quick jump; a mid-jump; and a high, smooth jump. Harris then approached these physics by manipulating the gravity upon keypress time. Only in this way, the player is able to perform different types of jumps to react fast enough to those obstacles. A simple mechanic such as jump takes so much effort and studying to polish! Never underestimate simple games, there are many underlying mechanics we don’ t see that we should be studying from! When designing assets, especially pixel assets, it’s very important to keep the pixels resolution the same as every other asset. A problem Michelle ran into was resizing these assets in Unity when these assets could have been made more easily in Photoshop rather than with Piskel on a larger scale while retaining the game’s resolution ratio by emulating it in the Photoshop project file.

Future Development 

In our future development, we would love to extend the game by creating more dynamic bots; more platform level design; and perhaps a final boss that battles with the player. Again, “I Wanna Be The Boshy”  is a great example for us to study from, the dynamics and complexity of the game is simply an industry-leading example for 2D platformer dodging game. While studying from it, we will also blend in with our personal taste from the countless hours of training from MOBAs. I believe this game has great potential to become the next popular training/dodging game!