Ball-oon Buster

Collect the gold coin which allows you to jump. Pop to balloon to move to the next level.

Left - A

Right - D

Pause - Esc

Jump - Space

Ball-oon Buster is the final version of my project for my Game Development bootcamp, part of the government's Skills for Life scheme. I had 4 weeks to work on this at home after 4 weeks at Playback Studio. Following the Prototype build (using the Brackeys 'Unity Beginner Tutorial') I stumbled and struggled to really define the game. There were versions with a car, one with an animated character running and many more complicated thing which I couldn't figure out how to rig up and code. This led to a lot of days of feeling down on myself and not being motivated to return.

Eventually I enlisted the help of pi.ai, both as a sounding board to better narrow down the scope of my game in the dwindling time frame that I had and as a teacher to help me with my biggest shortcoming, the code. I was given a lot of advice not to rely on AI which I luckily already knew thanks to being fairly tech savvy and curious about AI in general. However I found Pi to be an invaluable learning aid which allowed me to ask for advice on why my code was returning errors or how to even start with certain functions. There were many occasions when Pi simply didn't understand the context of the project no matter how much I was giving it and it would often be extremely confidently wrong. This taught me to check on forums and with other developers and start to discover when Pi would be leading me in the right direction and when it was simply trying to give me what it thought I wanted. I am very excited about the prospect of using AI integrated into game engines, but for now it is a useful starting point for things I have zero knowledge of. Pi helped me build confident through repetition and also through its failures. Like any tool AI can be great if used with thought and care.

At the end of the course I was able to return to Playback Studio and demo my game to my class as well as the next cohort who were about to embark on their own 4 week projects. I received some great feedback and even the negatives such as the controls being too twitchy and sensitive were genuinely contructive. It also taught me the value of playtesting which I had not done on the final build. There is a glitch under certain conditions which I never came across because I had gotten used to completing levels "correctly". Stress testing and breaking the game is something, like the control sensitivity, that QA testers would have found. On my next project I will make sure to get some playtime from friends and family and find out ways to log and address bugs, glitches, balancing and other issues that I may become blind to.

All in all I am super pleased with the outcome of this project, mainly because I finished it. I will be taking things I learnt such as watching for scope creep, ensuring I get the game play-tested and structuring my time better towards a deadline.