TIM BENITEZ
HELLO I'M TIM
I LOVE CREATING GAMES
Car Dodger
Car Dodger was a small game put together by three guys. The class was designed to help us understand the game development process from start to finish. Because the class was only five weeks long, we didn't have time to make a very large scale game. Because I am usually on the road, I thought up of a simple game that basically has the player move around other cars and vehicles on highways. I was thinking about the success of Flappy Bird and thought of making a gameas simple as that one. I put down some initial design work and then the three of us took on tasks. I myself worked with Dave Brown and Evan Tappero. I think I spelled his name right. Dave took the rest of the design work and went to documenting things. Because I was the only one with art education, I worked on the art assets. Evan did the programming. We all were game design majors, so none of us really learned programming. We used Game Maker Studio, because the game was so simple and the simplicity of the visual programming in Game Maker.
Concept Art
Here is a concept of what a car would look like in the game.
The main concept of the game. You are a car that wants to move around others in traffic instead of patiently driving. Right here we have the image of some virtual buttons used to move left and right. The original way the game was going to be played.
Here we added some more of some vertical movement to the mix. I think Evan had some of the vehicles coming down at different speeds, or we thought about doing so. I don't remember. Because of the way vehicles were coming down we decided that being able to go up and down would make it better for the player to get through gaps before they closed. Here we have two setups I came up with. I would have rather had a setup more like the one on the right so the player does not accidentally cross over and push a button with the bottom of their thumb.
Also, one thing to point out with the image on the left is that we played with the idea of having a gauge for the speed.
The Desert Level Concept. There would be three different levels for a change of pace and giving the player choices.
Level Select Screen
This is a design image to show how score would be recognized by the game. There would be an invisible line that spanned the whole screen horizontally. These invisible lines would be at the front end of each vehicle. The player car would have an imaginary line at the end of its car. Once the two lines collided (once) score would be added to the game. However, Evan took a more simple approach and just added score when vehicles exited the screen at the bottom. Probably a wiser choice.
Car Select Screen
Some Assets
Sprite Sheets
These were not created just for a variety of cars to choose from, even thought that variety is severely limited, they also provide a challenge because of their sizes.
Some other ideas we wanted to implement if we had time were some powerups (shown on the left) and an oil hazard. The Powerups would be speed up and down. The change in speed for player input that is. The green is speed up and the red is speed down.
The oil slick would take away player controls until they held down both left and right directions for about a second or two. The player would be sliding and hlding down the left and right buttons would be like holding the steering wheel firmly.
Below you will find a showcase of the game in motion.