AnacletoDuplito108: Night Heist: First Playable

Night Heist

Main Menu Screen

What is Night Heist? Night Heist is a platform game that my partner, Julia Velasquez, and I have made using the Game Maker software. Night Heist is about a robber trying to collect jewelry items inside a mansion, which are guarded by dogs and penguin cops (Yes, I said penguin cops). My role was the programmer, where I implemented all the functions for each character and created the design for each level. My partner Julia was the artist and in charge of designing the character sprites, level backgrounds, and testing the game.

Game Over Screen

Moving the robber is pretty straightforward by using the left and right arrow keys to move the character left or right. Hitting the up arrow key makes the robber jump. I added the ability to have the robber sprint by pressing down the shift key and either the left or right arrow key at the same time. The goal for the game is to collect as many jewelry and reach the final door without losing all three lives that you start out with from the beginning of the game. Touching the dogs and fireballs shot by the penguin cops will reduce the character's health. Touching the penguin cops will make the robber lose a life and just like baseball, three strikes and you're out!

The process in creating the digital prototype for Night Heist started with the idea of making a platform game because I came to get down so get out your seats and jump around! (Bonus points if you got that reference d^_^b ). Jokes aside, I thought a platform game would be simple and fun to play. I didn't realize until finishing this first playable version that collision and the other functional parts with the other characters would become annoying to fix. I wanted to make multiple levels so that the character could go back and forth. I wanted the robber to not be able to kill the enemies as a way to just focus on collecting the jewelry items instead of taking out the enemies. The process took about a day worth of watching YouTube tutorials and looking at the game maker manuals to implement some of the functions such as drawing the score, lives, and health bar for the robber. Other things I took the time to make sure was working was the collision effect from the dogs, fireballs, jewelry, and the doors with the robber. Overall the process took a while, but was worth it with how the game looks and feels as a first playable version.

The main question for players during play testing would be if the game is challenging and if there should be more incentives to collect the jewelry items other than for scoring purposes?