The setting of the game is in a cyberpunk future. I
choose this because I had an experience with a card game called Netrunner,
which has the same main idea as my game Codegate. Were in this world big
corporations rule most of the world and you’re a low life hacker that wants to
take away the control of these corporations. In order to give the other people
a fighting chance against them.
I want to create a game that would
embody the experience of being a computer hacker. Using this idea I wanted to
not only, make the game not a game but an experience. Codegate doesn’t resemble
any of the typical video games, because I choose not to make it like that. The
reason behind that is, the hacker experience isn’t exampled to you. You learn
how to use the game while playing it. The main point of this, was to create
this hacker experience that was real. That is why in some parts of the game the
stage changes so quickly the player is faced with this realization of not
knowing what to do. Just as if a real hacker was breaking through a firewall.
The game itself does give a chance to the player, even if you fail one stage
the player will be pushed back a stage and can retry as many times as he/she
wishes. Another element I wanted to put in was, this puzzle solving idea. Not
everything is meant to be straight forward, sometimes you will encounter situations
where you will need to get out of the game to solve the puzzle. I also decided
to put this type of enemy inside of the game that was never explained, an AI of
sorts. I felt it would give a nice twist to game and make it open for user
interpretation, giving the player the possibility making a back story for the
game. I know why I put it in and the story behind it, but I would like to see
what other people think of it while playing. As for the music I wanted to make
this serious/dark aura while playing. To further push the real hacker
experience.
Codegate’s idea was interesting to
me because it seemed like a type of game that was never really made much. Most
of the hacking type games were always considered some kind of mini event that
would happen inside a bigger game. They seemed so small and useless, like a
bump in the road that is your path through the game. Also there is so much
potential to this type of idea. Hacking can be almost any type puzzle you can
think of. Also how hacking was shown in these bigger games, were always based
off the same concept. The idea of making a path to some kind of point, and as
soon as you see this on screen you knew what to do. I really wanted to push the
idea of not knowing what to do. The challenge of figuring out how to solve an
unknown puzzle, always seemed interesting.
As for the technical side of the
project. I wasn’t too sure what program to use to make my game to begin with. I
was thinking of using gamemaker, because I had a more user friendly and 8-bit
graphic idea in mind. But I found myself using processing because it had given
me more options when it came to text, and text type activates. Also processing
was something that I’ve used in the past so, I didn’t start from not knowing
how to program it. I would still consider this to be one of my biggest
processing projects that I’ve ever made. It was hard for me to manage all the
different things that were triggering in my program. I only really encountered
this problem near the end of the project, when I put everything together. Close
to the end of the project I knew I could have coded it a lot better if I would
have used classes. But the thought process of coding the whole idea of Codegate
from nothing was really fun and interesting learning experience. The idea of
separating each stage of the game into a different if statements, and building
up each of those stages from different ideas that I found interesting. Each
stage of the game was a new challenge to face. The first was finding out how to
make strings type out when the player pushed a key. The next stage with the two
bars raising making the player key press as fast as possible to beat the
enemy’s bar. Finding the right speed for the bar to raise and the perfect
balance that would be challenging to the user. The stage with the password was
maybe one of the most complex mess of coding I’ve ever done. And am also certain
that there was a better way to code this part, but I didn’t have that much time
so I did what worked. So basically I need to make the player search for these
passwords outside of the game and then retype them in the correct order. In
order to get to the next stage. I had an “if” statement for pretty much each
password that would increase a counter each time the user inputs a key of a
certain password. Also inside these statements I had other statements of the
same passwords that would be the wrong passwords. If you would get one of the
wrong passwords it would push you back a stage. I got to admit once I figured
out how this would work, I was pretty proud of myself. I found myself getting
lost in my code a lot while coding this part. Around this stage I really wanted
to put more imagery in my game. So far it was only text that you would see on
screen. I really didn’t want to make the game seem like a text based adventure
type of game. So I decided to create the gifs for the title screen and the last
boss fight. After finishing the password stage of the game I got to the final
part of the game. Had many ideas that I also wanted to add into the game but I
found myself with little time left to finish up the rest of the project. So the
last stage of the game I wanted the user to encounter this AI type boss fight
where the user needed to enter the right mouse and key combination to increase
their bar. The different keys popping up on screen was maybe one of the hardest
part of the game because I haven’t used timers before. Once I got help for the
timers I found it really useful. Timers are maybe the most important part of a
game they can run pretty much anything. Other than that I made this type of red
spot that would pop on screen while the keys were up, that the player needed to
click to help increase their bar. Once I played through this stage I found
myself looking at my keyboard a lot trying to find the right key and looking
back at the screen. The last thing I had problems with was the music. I had no
problem making the music and getting a background song looping through the
whole game. It’s once I got to certain parts of the game I wanted some sound
effects to play during the stage. The problem was most of the music based
commands for the minim library works only in the void setup. But all my stages
were being done in the draw function. I took me a while to find the solution.
So basically in most of my stages I have this type of bar that would fill up.
So I decided to use these bars as different queues for the sounds to play.
During certain intervals the sound effect would play. Even after putting
everything together, I still had bugs in my game. It seems every time I would
test my game again I found some sort of bug. Even now that its finish I’m
pretty sure there are still some bugs in my code.
I got two people to play through the
game this is what they thought of the game:
“Codegate
is a refreshing and contemporary take on a classical learning game: A mix of
“figure out what to do” gameplay and “learn to type with a keyboard” gameplay.
Despite its educational component, it is also a disturbingly eerie game that
gives the impression of an artificial intelligence takeover of a computer
system, very reminiscent of nineties sci-fi movies. In the dark and with
reasonable volume, you can really feel the intensity of the game. When playing
for the first time in the aforementioned conditions, you get thrusted into a
hostage-like situation against the clock and against an unknown opponent who
plays by undefined sets of rules. Although not a triple-A game and not at all
comparable in term of production value, the game evokes feelings of tense
claustrophobia characteristic of fully 3D rendered horror games by using:
flicker of text, creepy music and intentionally confusing and timed puzzles.”
“This
game has an interesting concept and is unique by nature. My experience while
playing Codegate was filled with both frustration and intrigue. The game tries
to emulate what it would be like to be a hacker, however, I found there to be a
lot of unnecessary typing. I progressed through the game by simply pressing
many buttons on my keyboard at once. Overall, I enjoyed the game and found it
to be a refreshing change of pace.”
Download: Codegate
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