Mechanical Help

Status: Complete

Game design 2 was easily my favorite class of my remote time at UTD, and with that class, we had the assignment of making a short demo of a game every week, drawing up the concepts, paper map, and design documents fairly quickly. Out of this came what later became mechanical help, my personal favorite project out of the designs that I have done. This section will outline mechanical help and how it came to be.

Origins:

As was said earlier, throughout the semester, we had an assignment every week where we had to showcase a different mechanic. Week 4 was using 3+ characters in a space theme. How we differentiated the characters was up to us, and for starters, my bright idea was just to have the main character be a human who would control robots to do various tasks on the ship. While this didn’t come to fruition at this point, it ended up being my most fun project that I worked on that semester, so I had the chance to expand on it, creating what is now known as mechanical help.

Iteration 1: Robots and sizes

With my theme set, I set out to create a demo of something I could later mold into something more interesting. While I only had a week to create assets and code, I went with something relatively simple - collecting coins in a platformer level (as this was only my 3rd demo working with game maker 2). My differentiation between the characters was also relatively simple - making them different sizes and affecting the gravity between the robots so they would fall faster than the human, allowing all three to traverse different areas of the map. While I unfortunately do not have any pictures or video of the original, most of the elements are still present in the current mechanical help.

Iteration 2: The Final

With the demo created and the rest of the class passing by, we slowly approached our final project. We had another week to improve one of our projects and make it more interesting and something to have the potential to turn into a game. Since mechanical help was my most voted, I got straight to working more on this project. While I was playing around with the gravity and trying to figure out how to manipulate them further, I stumbled across a glitch that got some of my characters stuck on the ceiling. This fascinated me, so messing around with some of the code revealed why - essentially, while that object was touching that block, the gravity was set to 0. Which means they could keep their vertical position while still being able to move horizontally. Kind of like a magnet that attracts metal. Thus my second differentiation was born - the robots could grab onto these magnet blocks, which would allow them to access higher areas without them jumping to them. What came out of it was this paper map:

With my level designed and my robot/humans differentiated, I got to work. Below, is a walkthrough of the final level and how the magnet blocks were utilized. If you would like to try the game, a download is below.

Download Mechanical Help here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eXvBhLlxoizw2581xLo0QZiWu1izYnx7/view?usp=sharing