ANDREW FINLAY
Second Line Engineer / Programmer
ANNABELLE'S ASYLUM
Time is the key. Make the right decision in time to escape from your crazy girlfriend in an asylum to progress through levels. Make the wrong decision and suffer the consequences. Tick Tock.
Team Members (Protelum):
Andrew Finlay
Iveta Stripeikaite
Rahul Patel
Alex Mocanu
Megan Friend
Janos Torok
Target Hardware:
Raspberry Pi B+
OS:
Raspbian
Time Frame:
8 weeks
The Game:
Point and click adventure game to be made on Scratch 1.4.
MY CONTRIBUTION
In terms of my role within this project, I initially started out as just a team member who would program the game and help others with the programming due to this being my strength. However, as the project progressed on, myself and Iveta naturally took over in leading roles and ensured that certain tasks were being completed by the members. In addition to this, I also designed 3 of backdrops for the levels and the majority of the doors within the game. I also maintained my original responsibility of programming and eventually I also put each of the levels together along with the three that I programmed myself.
ARTWORK
In terms of the artwork that I created for the game, I started off by creating my concepts for the male & female character faces as well as an initial concept of the cell. As time progressed we then decided we wanted a 16-bit representation in our game hence the walk animation I created, but finally, we decided on regular cartoon-esque designs which I used to create the three levels and the doors. As you can see from the above gallery, I created the level designs within Adobe Illustrator first to get the shapes and such correct and then imported them into Adobe Photoshop in order to add details such as lighting and shadows.
PROGRAMMING
In terms of the programming aspect of the game, I was responsible for programming my levels and then putting the game together.
Within these rooms, I simply used a when this sprite is clicked event when clicking a key for instance and the player will move to this object and it will wait until the player is within a certain position and then it will pick up said key. This is achieved by hiding the object and adjusting variables within the game.
This method of programming was used for all of the items within the game. In terms of the changing of scenes, this was achieved by hiding everything on the previous scene and showing the items on the next screen as well as resetting the position of the player.
Due to the fact that having looping code made the game perform worse on the low-spec Pi, we had to ensure that this was kept to a minimum and one forever loop was used and this was on the player movement. This also meant that I had to ensure that one walk cycle would end and another would begin when changing scenes due to positioning issues.
Below you can find some snippets of my code from throughout the game.
