Blog Post 7: INGRESS

Ingress is the coolest game I think I've ever downloaded on my iPhone (although I haven't downloaded that many games on my iPhone.) It uses a real-time GPS tracking system to let you move through space and find "Portals" that you can either strengthen or weaken, depending on your alliance. It is such a cool premise with a very simple execution. You tap the "portals" which are located where different pieces of art/history are around the world. Then you can link portals, destroy them, capture them, strengthen them, etc.

One highlight of the game today was when me and a huge team of blue were trying to get to a neutral portal. Once a portal is owned, it stays green or blue depending on who captures it. A neutral portal is either new, or has been destroyed so that it can be reclaimed. Well by the time I got to the neutral portal, a small team of green had conquered it. I lied to them, telling them I was green, and then walked around with them for a bit and finally took over the portal they had just made... as a SPY!

I believe that I got the right screenshot for when I took over the green portal. Honestly, I'm not sure.

I still don't know how to do that much in this game, and being Level 1 is frustrating because I feel like I can't destroy anything, I just have to play within the fields of blue. Today was really fun and I am going to continue to play this game on my own!

Blog Post 6: Final Corgiboard Game

I had the pleasure of working on corgiboard with Bowen Chan.

This has been a truly eye-opening experience! I never thought that in less than 2 months I could have made a functional videogame, but here I am. I'd like to explain the process of how we got to this point.

Before we made any assets or anything, we familiarized ourselves with GameMakerStudio. Unfortunately, it only runs on windows, but if you can get an virtual machine running on your mac, it does the job as well. It's an extremely user-friendly and powerful engine for making 2D games! I was so pleased with how it functioned. After doing some tutorials in class and familiarizing ourselves with it in our own time, we got into our groups and brainstormed. I noticed both me and my partner liked skateboarding, so I suggested we do a game about skateboarding dogs. It was an instant "yes."

I spent the next couple of weeks making game assets in photoshop. I pixelized them and we were able to just scale them up in game maker. Originally I had sent timed .gifs of my animations but we ended up needing to import the frames individually as .pngs. The sidewalk has the illusion of scrolling even though it is just an image. We programmed the obstacles to move; it was a bit of a guess and check since the sidewalk was a little arbitrary.

Although I had a family emergency and I had to take a week from school to visit home, I still had a blast on the project and Bowen really pulled through and helped me out in the end. He handled both programming and some last-minute graphics!

I look forward to making more games in the future and I am so happy I am equipped with this knowledge.


You can download the game here!