Overview
Gnomify The World is an infinite scroller where you, the Gnome, must bounce off people’s heads to transform them into fellow gnomes. As you go along, you will be able to combo bounces to earn even more points, bounce off the environment to continue your combo, and attempt to hide and evade the police officers, all to earn as high a score as possible and transform the city into a gnome-filled paradise.
There were to major areas of this game I was in charge of. I put together the score and high score system, making it so that the high score would update once a new high score was reached, making the points the player earns scale as they get a higher combo, and creating the score text that would appear and disappear to show the player how many points they earned with that “gnomification”. Additionally, I was also in charge of creating the clusters of people that would spawn in, making adjustments to their speed and positions when they do spawn in, as well as trying to adjust the spawning of the clusters to create a natural flow for the player.
Progression
First Build
In the earliest build, I had gotten a basic version of the scoring system implemented. And since I felt it would be integral to the gameplay loop, I also got the combo system implemented as well, where the score earned increases by 100 for every bounce then reset back to 100 points earned when the player lands on the ground. I also got some basic groupings of people made and placed into the spawner, aiming to have enough variety to keep the players engaged. However, it was very easy to notice the different groupings, so I would have to take it further.
Making Progress
In the next build, I focused on adding the extra elements that the player could interact with, namely the mailbox and fence. The problem was that I couldn’t just spawn them in on their own since these are items that would be in front of the houses, so I had to get in the logic that would spawn them in with the houses at a random rate, but also get them to move at the same speed as the houses.
An additional thing that I continued working on was trying to make the people being spawned in more believable. On top of adding some more spawn variations, I also included some logic to try and make the people face the direction they were “moving” in on the screen.
Almost There
Come the third build, I was still figuring out the best way to control how the people would spawn in for the player to engage with. I decided to create a second spawner specifically for the individual people to spawn in and mix in with the created groups. The feedback I got from my classmates told me that it did manage to hide the groupings pretty well, so I kept this change for the final build.
I also spent some time looking into the balancing of the officers, trying to mess around with their size, speed, spawn rate, and the time for them to appear on the screen after the warning. It felt like the officer kept bouncing between being too quick and difficult for the player to react to and being too easy for the player to evade. Eventually, a larger variety of officers were thrown into the game with the goal to add more variety to the challenge and keep the player more engaged.
Finale
I spent the time to the final build implementing the final ideas to the game. First, I went and got the logic and UI elements needed to show off the high score to the player. The idea was to give a further reward and recognition to the player for playing well and encourage the player to continue aiming for a higher score, and what better way than the classic high score method.
Then, I got the gnome buildings and gnome objects into the spawners and set up the logic that would start changing the normal buildings and normal objects to these gnomified ones as the player gnomifies more people. This way, the player would continue to receive visual feedback on how well they are doing.