Coffee Caverns Playable Demo 1.0a
Well finally! I have a demo that everyone can try out. I haven’t really spent any time on balancing the game play so don’t expect much in that respect. The idea of the game is simple. You control the little guy at the bottom of the screen with the left and right arrow keys. Your job is to collect the coffee beans that fall from the top of the cavern without being hit by one of the falling rocks.
Ongoing
I have not incorporated a state system yet. When you run the game it will immediately start playing. Once you get hit by a rock the game is over, you will have to close the window and restart it.
Known Issues
For some reason pressing the Esc key is not exiting. I am going to fix this, just haven’t had a chance to yet.
Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions.
As a software designer I realize how this project could take quite a large amount of time and effort to arive at this polished product. I also realize that this an unfinished product. Therefor, what follows is merely my comments regarding the experiences that I had. P.S. you can “thank” Jollie for this review.
Alright I found two bugs so far.
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1.) Looks like the sprite for when the character obtains a coffee bean is a little off center. Easy fix, no big deal.
2.) The other is when I re-run the program (The first execution was after install) the link on my desktop logs an error: “[14:25:37] Couldn’t open media/tiles.bmp”. I am assuming that the shortcut is calling the program and that the media directory based off of the execution directory. This could be because I installed in a custom directory and could be solved by creating a log file in the installer to tell the program where to look for the media directory. This could also just be a bug with windows 7 beta
Other than that, I could suggest a full paper on user experience but I will point out some easy to implement things instead.
1.) Variability – users like change.
a.) Make the rocks and perhaps the beans fall at random speeds. Of course these speeds should be within sane limits.
b.) Make the beans change the charater speed. This would make a metaphorical link in the user’s head. Coffee makes you faster, and perhaps over time slower.
2.) Scoring – I noticed the score in the title bar. This is only pre-release acceptable. People like to know there score and they would like it big and bright on their screen. Scoring is one aspect that makes some people play longer.
Things I like:
1.) Graphics. These are just enough graphics for this type of game.
2.) Sound. It is always nice to see sound in games of this nature as it was a difficult to implement the last time I tried to code a game.
3.) Simplicity. The controls are easy enough to understand even without instructions. This game has simple objectives and simple consequences.
Thanks for your input. I am working on the final version I will be submitting in which I have already fixed a few of these things. I am trying to figure out how to get my install program to set the start in directory on the shortcuts it creates. I was going to have the score at the top of the screen, with a +1 or something pop up each time you grabbed a bean. Too bad I don’t have another couple of hours. The competition ends at 11 but I have other things I need to do tonight.