The Collector
2D passive role-playing game that centers around a collector that travels the world in search of items to add to his museum. This is a personal game development project made in Unity in the Summer of 2021.
The collector is constantly traversing through an environment, and looks for an item every ten minutes. The rarity of the item collected derives different values in gold which allows him to purchase upgrades to lower his chance of missing an item each time he checks.
The game was majorly inspired by Mousehunt, where players play the role of a royal mouse hunter, catching over 700 unique and ridiculous mice over the kingdom of Gnawnia.
As my first game development project, I was ambitious in what I wanted to create, and decided to take on all elements of the game development and design (which I would later discover to be impractical especially as a first project), including game mechanics, technical design, animation, art design, etc.
Some illustration and ideation were done in collaboration with a friend.
Read on to see my process.
conceptualisation and ideation
The project began with basic conceptualisation and prototyping of the game. The idea of a collector walking across the world to collect items was already at the back of my head, and I just had to think of how to transcribe the idea into a presentable visual.
I particularly enjoyed the brainstorming stage of the development. Some of my ideas included (not a comprehensive list):- Completion of a section in the museum would give the player a unique reward.
Each environment would have a unique set of items to collect.
Each environment would have a few sub-locations.
Collector can wear different equipment as requirement into different areas of the map.
technical set up and scripting
After having a large pool of ideas, I began development of the game proper, setting up the basic project parameters in Unity, writing C# scripts to govern game mechanics, manage player data, etc.
This part of the project was particularly challenging given my non software engineering or computer science background. Nonetheless, with my knowledge of Python and logical application, I was able to quickly learn the basics of C# and Unity Engine.
Each element of the game was governed by at least one script, such as currency, player data, collected items, get item chance, etc., all of which were then managed by a central script "Game Manager".
game art
This part of the project was arguable the most time consuming. I began the art process by determining the art style I wanted to draw in. Naturally, the style was largely inspired by Mousehunt, which was the main source of inspiration on this project.
The art style took a bit of practice, and I typically sketched out the design of each sprite before drawing them in Procreate. This would include the sprites of the character, collection items, environments and certain UI elements such as buttons, museum menus, shop menus, etc.
Environment, character and objects game art
animation design
There were a few elements of animation in this project, one of which being the walking animation of the collector. I began the animation process by researching on walking animation keyframes to guide my drawing with a sketch. Despite not drawing every keyframe of a walking cycle later on for the animation, this would prove to be useful exploratory study as the rigging animation follows the same principles to express the walking animation.
Another element that required animations were the background, which utilized the parallax scrolling effect to portray an element of depth as the background passes slower than the foreground. The scene passes to the left as the collector walks towards the right to give the illusion of the character walking forward.
game mechanics
Without delving too much into details, the mechanics of the game involve the player tapping the screen every ten minutes to initiate a "look around". Each time the collector looks around, there will be a chance roll, which will determine whether or not the collector picks up an item, followed by an item roll, which will determine which item the character picks up.
Each item derives value in terms of gold, which the player can use to purchase items in the shop. Each collected item is recorded in the museum catalogue, which includes visual displays of the items, descriptions and records of how many times the player has collected each particular item.
Lastly, the player can visit the shop to purchase upgrades with the gold they have earned. These upgrades will increase the probability of the collector finding items, or unlock certain environments (not developed), etc.
The logic of these mechanics were coded in C#.
Drawing board of game mechanics
final thoughts
As a conclusion, this project was an important learning experience to me. Ultimately, this project lasted for a whole summer, and is still considered incomplete simply due to the huge magnitude of workload at which I wanted to pursue.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and it has inspired me to continue building more games.
infinite side-scrolling runner
infinite side-scrolling runner
