ANDREW FINLAY
Second Line Engineer / Programmer
SPACE
BREAKER
Speed and accuracy is key. You have one life, an army of enemies to defeat, a paddle and a ball. What're you waiting for? Space Breaker is a sci-fi twist on your popular brick breaker game.
*Volume warning
Team Members (App Rev):
Andrew Finlay
Rory O'Donnell
Janos Torok
Ahmed Hidjou
Reese Irvine
Target Hardware:
Nexus 7 (2013)
OS:
Android
Time Frame:
8 weeks
The Game:
An Android app that has four mini-games. Needs to be simple and fun.
MY CONTRIBUTION
In terms of my role within this project, I initially started out as the person who would be responsible for the shell application that would bring all of the games together. However, after complications with one team member causing them to not turn up, I had to change my role and create an entire game alone instead as well as helping with concept designs for another game. I started by drawing out and designing electronically the level design for another game. I then moved onto actually creating my own game which was successfully achieved using Adobe Flash Professional CC along with ActionScript 3. Once the game was completed, I exported it as an .apk file so it was playable on the Nexus 7 (2013).
ARTWORK
In terms of the artwork that I created for the game, I started off by drawing out concepts for another team member's game as this we a pre-agreement that we arranged so we all contributed to each other's games. I also created a version of Spatium in Adobe Photoshop CC to have a more realistic representation of what the game would look like.
After that, I created some basic skeleton designs for my own game which I could use to test the ActionScript 3 code. After the code was functional and my game skeleton was finished, I moved onto creating the graphics for it. I achieved the pixel look by creating my assets with a pixel gird in Photoshop. Once I had finished the design, instead of zooming back out and having a normal looking graphic, I instead screenshot the pixel design and used this in the game, hence achieving the pixel look. In terms of the background, I generated noise within Photoshop and then adjusted the levels to ensure the black and grey were darker to achieve the galaxy-look.
PROGRAMMING
In terms of the programming aspect of the project, I was responsible for programming my entire game.
In order to programme my game, instead of using FlashBuilder, I instead opted to use Flash Professional CC as this gave me a more visual basis for my game and I personally found this much easier to use.
I used ActionScript 3 to code my game and due to the fact that the target for the game is a fairly powerful Android tablet, this allowed me to essentially code whatever I saw fit. I used arrays, functions, while loops, if statements and a variety of other pieces of code.
Below you can find some snippets of my code from throughout the game.
