I’ve made my first game!

I really wanted to take part in the gamedev.tv gamejam this year, it always looks like a lot of fun. However, the week it was happening has been way busier than usual. I ended up making the game over a weekend. I made a tile based platform game called Easter Bunny’s Lunar Egg Hunt. In the game an evil wizard has built a machine that teleported everyone’s Easter eggs away to a hidden crater on the moon. The Easter Bunny must rescue them and return home in the spaceship NASA lent him.

Initially I thought coding would be the biggest challenge, but the first big problem I hit was not having suitable graphical assets to make a game. Reusing assets was basically essential to making a game in this amount of time, so I decided to make a tile-based game. I drew tiles to make the lunar surface and the sky full of stars. For the remaining assets I used the AI image generator Craiyon to make some images of bunnies, space ships, jellyfish and easter eggs. I picked the best ones and edited these to make them suitable for use. Despite some weird results, I would definitely use AI images again for learning projects and placeholder images in development. It gave me a big step forward in this project when time was very tight.

Most importantly I wanted to focus on gameplay and level design because these are my specific areas of interest. I wanted to make the game challenging enough to keep players engaged, and create a level which players will want to explore. I’ll talk more about how I did this in a future post.