Maze game Progress Week 1

Maze game in GameMaker

Level 3 Diploma in Video Games Design

Client Brief

Create a maze game for the students to play that also helps them develop their mathematical skills

The main character of this game “Brainbox” has to move from level to level solving increasing difficult maths based problems. Each level should show a different maths problem and the level of the maths problem should be GCSE grade C Mathematics. It must have at least 5 levels of increasing difficulty with collectables, enemies.

Target Audience – The target audience is people who are aiming to improve their maths skills to GCSE grade C level. This would most likely be GCSE students studying for their GCSE’s who are around the age of 15 and 16.

Aim of Project – The idea is to create a game that is both enjoyable and helps people learn better maths skills. I will aim to do this by combining fun gameplay with maths based puzzles. I have created a setting of a futuristic school where the teachers are cyborgs and have malfunctioned. The player will play as Brainbox, a similar cyborg, who must defeat the teachers and improve their maths skills along the way.

Own Brief

I am aiming to make a maze game that will teach GCSE grade C maths to people playing the game. The target audience will be mainly students of age 15 and 16 so I will have to make the game exciting and engaging to someone of that age. I will also have to be aware of creating content that will not be suitable for people of that age. This is something that I would learn through Pan European Game Information or Entertainment Standards Ratings Board. These bodies govern over the age ratings that games are given which warn people of the content and make it illegal for people under the appropriate age to buy the game. I will aim to make at least 5 levels of increasing difficulty. This will be both in maths and maze difficulty. It will include a “time limit” mechanic whereas the player plays through a level there will be a countdown clock that when it reaches zero the player will have to start the level over. This ties in to the idea that the player has to quickly make their way to a ticking time bomb that they will have to defuse with a maths problem. It will feature obstacles such as electrical discharge that bounces around the room that the player must avoid. Enemies will roam the levels and try to catch the main character.

Progress Update

By the end of the first week I plan to have familiarized myself with Game Maker and have created the main character sprite of BrainBox.

After some experimenting I have decided that 1280 by 768 is the resolution I should use, the resolution of the screen is 1920 by 1080 so if I can figure out how to snap it to full screen when the game runs my 64 x 64 sprites will be more size appropriate for the game. I want to have 64x64 sprites because I can put more detail on the sprites especially when editing them in GameMaker's sprite editor. I have decided in the end to reduce my sprites size back down again and just have a windowed screen.

I more or less scrapped all of the work I mentioned in the last paragraph. In the end I decided on a room size of 1024 by 768 and attempted to use views to zoom the players view in.

I created the main character sprite which was inspired by these images. From top to bottom they are: Robobrain from Fallout 3, Brian the Brain from Cel Damage, Wall-E and a bomb defusal robot.

Here is the design for the main character Brainbox that I came up with. The original

This was more of an original concept design than a final image. In the end I had to change the image to adjust the dimensions of the sprite. This is because the original image was far wider than it was tall. This meant that if I was to create a maze game around this sprite the paths in the maze would have to be rectangular. This would deviate from the norm of what a maze looks like as normal mazes have square paths of uniform size. This is the final version of BrainBox that I settled on.

Notice how the arms are much closer to the main body of the robot and the main body is actually taller to give a more square shaped sprite.