Rooftop Tippy-Taps
Authors: Doris Park, Sandra Puusepp, Eva-Maria Pedosk
About the game
Our little game is about the adventures of a cat Milo. The legend has it, that Milo likes to sneak out when his owner is asleep and runs up to the roof of his house when the night falls. Distracted by the beauty of the night Milo starts to run on the roofs, jumping over difficult obstacles.
Characters
Our game has two characters - the main character Milo aka the player...
...and the game villain, a dog called Bulldozer.
Game rules and controls
The idea of the game is to complete all the levels and enjoy the game! The player should try not clash into the game villains and complete as many levels as possible. If the player clashes into Bulldozer, the level will start over.
The keys used to play this game are arrow keys and space bar. Arrow keys are used to move back and forth, space is used for jumping. If the space bar is pressed for longer time, Milo will jump higher.
Progress description
The first thing we created was the background with the main menu. All the sprites for the buttons and the background image were created in GIMP. The user can click the buttons with a cursor or they can navigate the menu using arrow keys. The buttons also have little transitions to make it easier for the user to understand which one is selected or clicked.
Once the menu was done, we designed the tiles to create houses. Our game style is old-school arcade and we created this feel by also using GIMP. We used tilemaps to quickly and easiliy put levels together. Working with a tile palette:
As a next step we started combining levels and the menu.When selecting "Start" the first scene called "Level 1" was loaded. Then we started working on the first character Milo and writing the most important scripts that were used to control the physics, movement and fall detection. At first Milo didn't have any animations. It was just a placeholder sprite. The time spent on Milo's character was the longest.
Next, we added a Cinemachine's virtual camera to make the camera movement smoother and more 2D game-like. The regular camera moves along with every move the character makes, but with Cinemachine the camera moved only if the character had "moved outside the box".
If the character enters the blue area, the camera will slowly follow. However, if they enter the red area, the camera will follow quickly. Ingame example of this movement:
Once a few test levels were created, we added some additional movements to the background (a shooting star and some moving fog). We also created end-points to each level, which moves the player to the next round. End-point is combined of two parts: a sphere (collision detector) and a particle system. The reason we chose to make level switches using particle system, was to make the game more dynamic.
Then it was time for Milo to get some animations and more detailed sprites. Animating seemed pretty difficult at first. We added the transitions between Milo's three animations (idle, walk and jump).
As a final step we added our villain Bulldozer and it's movements and continued to perfect the game.
Difficulties during development
One of the trickiest parts were character animations since we had no prior experience with Unity. Once we got the hand of it, we got it done fairly fast.
Writing the player controller wasn't that easy either. Even with a tutorial the code solution didn't come that naturally and it took some time to understand it better and to shape it to our needs.
The most time consuming was creating the environment in general.
Used technologies
We developed our game in Unity and created necessary artwork using GIMP and Photoshop.
Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJO8V-YRQoI&feature=youtu.be
Launching guide
1. Clone or download our Github repository.
2. Open the project folder.
3. Navigate to the folder "Builds".
4. Open the file "RooftopTippyTaps.exe".