Artistic talents

Let's get one thing straight: I am no artist. I failed Art so many times in middle school. And when I saw fail, I mean F's. To this day, my one artistic achievement is this one painting I did of Shadow Lugia, Pikachu and Chikorita at the end of 8th grade.

It hangs proudly in my room back home after all these years

Fastforward 8+ years and nothing has changed. Even with the simplest artistic stuff, I still fail. That's why when I had to work on the aesthetic design of Protect The Jollof, I knew there would be trouble.

Yesterday I attempted to work on the background of the level. This is what ended up happening:

Yeah, I may take everything off and make it plain.

Back from the dead

First off, apologies for the lack of updates. I got caught up in a fairy tale job hunting story that ended abruptly yesterday.

I did manage to get some work done in that time. I had planned to show a gameplay video at my interview. I never got a chance to so here's a super raw gameplay video where you can hear my exasperated sighs.

13 days to PAX Dev. Time to put in super werk!!!

In my happy place

Sorry for the month of radio silence. I was busy with the World Cup and went through a small rough patch in my life. Well, the World Cup's over and I'm much better now so how about I implement more stuff to "Protect the Jollof"? :]

First off, here's an updated screenshot

So, I decided to first target the game for iPad due to the extra real estate in terms of screen size. I increase the map size and built a new path. I'm gonna have to sit down one day and actually design the background for the level (I'm not an artist though...)

In terms of base health, I put a pot of jollof that reduces each time an ant gets to the end of the screen.

I still have a couple more stuff to implement like money and health bars above the ants. The then bare bones game will be done and then I can think about gameplay elements like how to make waves harder and multiple levels.

Hopefully, I'll upload a gameplay video soon.

Protect the Jollof

My favorite type of mobile games are tower defense games. 2 of my fave games are Catch-A-Prince and Crystal Defenders.

Catch-A-Prince

Crystal Defenders

So naturally I decided to try a stab at making my own tower defense game. I started last summer and worked on it for a while but got caught up on my summer research and then senior year started. Senior year's over now and I'm heading to PAX Dev at the end of August. I'm hoping to network and show off a game. Instead of making a new game from scratch, I decided to pick up my little tower defense and really work at it!

The game's called "Protect the Jollof". For my non-African readers, jollof is a common food in West Africa. It looks similar to brown rice and jambalaya rice. So, essentially, you are protecting a pot of jollof from invading insects. 

When I started working on the game last year, I used Aiden Fry's tower defense tutorial. The tutorial is split into 10 parts. I started with parts 1-4. The tutorials are down but the source code can be found at http://aidenfry.tk/ 

As of this writing, I haven't changed much in the game. I pretty much just opened it up in Xcode to make sure it still ran.

The items at the bottom are suppose to be cans of bug spray. I might change it to a clip art image of a can of bug spray. Also, the ants are walking backwards but that's a simple image flip.

Currently, the game crashes when an ant makes it to the end of the screen because I haven't added any end game boundaries. I want to add a life meter at the top right that is a picture of jollof and decreases each time an any make it to the end. I think I'll work on adding that at some point this week in between all the World Cup madness.

Until next time!