Perfect Pic

My game is a 2.5D platformer about being a tourist in the Badlands National Park. The goal of the game is to visit all the scenic spots and take a photo there before the sun sets. The player moves left and right using A and D and jumps from platform to platform with W. They must also avoid the flora and fauna (because touching animals is illegal and cacti are just prickly), or else they will be penalized 5 seconds. At the end of the game, the player can see all the photos they managed to take. I chose this topic because I felt like the experience translated well into a game. In real life, I had to jump from rock to rock and had to scramble across some very scary ledges. To make myself feel better, I pretended like I was playing a game on the playground, which actually made me feel much better. There was also the added time pressure of visiting all the must see sites before the sun went down because we were too afraid to drive in the dark. 

Surprisingly, working with the physics turned out a lot harder to do than the custom functions I wanted. I had to figure out how to combine forces and vectors so that the player would respond the way I wanted it to. I also had to take into account the minuscule differences in decimals between frames, something I hadn't really thought about before.  I really enjoyed messing around in Maya and writing the scripts. It felt like an adventure discovering new functionalities. Surprisingly,  I didn't like designing the level. Moving objects around and trying to vary the layout was very tedious. Overall, I think making this game was a good decision on my part. I tend to go overboard and give myself too far of a goal. By limiting myself to a simple platformer, I was able to concentrate on the feel of the game more than trying to make everything work. I also think this was a fun theme to work with. I'm not sure about my decision to put all the scenic points into a single level and feel like I should've divided them up into different scenes.