Game Making

Team Members
Aditya Dwivedi - 2014128
Ojasvi Singh Randhawa - 2014070

Game Making


Most of us are addicted to games especially the pick up and play ones, the games which one could play on the go like flappy bird , temple run , candy crush etc. But did you ever wonder
how these games are made ? How much effort and resources goes into them? It's due to this curiosity that we chose the topic of game making. Ever wondered how cool it would be
to make a game of your own. So lets get started.

The Idea


The first and foremost thing required was to plot the details about the game in our minds. To visualize what our game should look like and then sketch it on a rough sheet.
We decided to make a never ending game just like subway surfers or temple run, as such games just require a basic structure and then everything is based on randomization.
After a lot of thinking we came up with an idea of a game called "QUAKE RUNNER". The basic objective of the game was simple , just dodge the rocks and fight your way through earthquake.

Software


After finalizing the game in our minds , it was time to do some real work. To convert our thoughts into reality , after a lot of research we finalized Stencyl as our software for
game making as it is a software suited for beginners, had powerful easy to use tools, had support for coding and great games like The Brim and Reaching Finality were created using it.
Click here to download the software.
We will run down through the features of Stencyl as we show the assets of our game in the following step by step guide.

Guide


  • This how the starting page of stencyl looks like.
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  • Click on the dotted box which says "Click here to create a new game". Since we are creating a game from scratch. Select "Blank Game".
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  • This will open a window where you have to enter the name of your project and the dimensions of the window in which the game will be played.
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  • From here onwards, we will refer to our project. On the left pane on your dashboard, the first option is "Actor types" which is used to create and manipulate actors of your game. You can see we have created two actors.
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  • We'll dig deep into our "Player" actor. After you double click on "Player" , at the top of the screen you can see 5 tabs. The first tab is the "Appearance tab" which is used to customize the appearance and animation of your actor based on frames.
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  • Under the "Behaviours" tab you can add predefined actions for your actors. Here we added the jump action for "Player".
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  • Under the "Events tab" you can create/edit your own code rather than using the predefined behaviours. In the following picture you can see we have written a code to end the game when player hits a rock using a Boolean value.
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  • Under the "Physics tab" you can edit how the physics of the game affects your actor.
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  • Under the "Properties tab" you can change the name of your actor. And the most important part is setting the actor's group which is used in determining the outcome of collisions with other actors.
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  • The other actor which is the rock contains logic which derives game difficulty and it also triggers scoring. As the game progresses we increase rock's speed and then slow it down for a bit so that player finds it difficult to adapt. (We are not moving the player actor but the rocks are being moved which gives the effect as if player was moving). In the following two images you can see the logic mentioned.
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  • Now we head back to dashboard and take a look at the "Backgrounds tab". The background tab is used to insert background images for different scenes.
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  • The "Fonts tab" is used to create fonts of various formats to display text on the score. Here we have created a font to display the score on the screen.
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  • The next tab is "Scene tab". This is the most important aspect of the game. This where core game logic is created. Here we have created 3 scenes one for the title , one when the game gets over and one where the gameplay takes place. The scene where gameplay takes place is named quaky , lets dig deep into this scene. The scene marked with star is the scene from where game will start executing.
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  • The first tab under the quaky scene is used to design the layout of the scene. Here we have created a platform for our player.
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  • The next two tabs i.e. the behaviour tab and events tab are used to write the logic of the game. It's the place where all the actors interact with each other. Behaviours are used for predefined codes where as event is used for writing your own code. Under the events tab we have created three events. The first one is "Created". The code written under this executes only once when the scene is initialized. We used it to create and place our actors namely player and rock and also to initialize screen shaking effect.
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  • The next one is "Drawing". This used to display various things like text, images etc in the scene. Here we have used it to display score.
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  • The third and the last one is "Updating". The code under this is constantly executed. We have used it to create an exit mechanism and take the player to Game Over screen based on the Boolean value (prev is a game attribute which is nothing but global attribute) received from player actor.
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  • Again heading back to dashboard , looking at the next tab which is "Sounds" is used to import sound effect and then they can be used in the game.
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  • The final tab is the "Tilesets". We used this tab to create platform for our quaky scene.
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  • The last feature that we would like to talk about is Stencyl Forge. It's icon is present in the top pane of the screen. Stencyl Forge contains resources which one can download and use them in their game. Most of the resources we have used in our game like background images , the actors , sound effects etc came from Stencyl Forge. Stencyl Forge is also used to post your games and take a look at games posted by other people.
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Stencyl has many more features. In the limited time span provided to us we were able to explore only these features but they were sufficient to enable us to create a decent game. The link to our game has been provided below , you can go and check it out. We hope that this tutorial proved useful for you and gave a brief outlook on game making and the software.

Just drag and drop the downloaded file in your browser(requires flash) and click on the game screen to make it active and then hit enter to start.

Game Link
(The background music of the game is from the movie The Pirates Of Caribbean)

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