Video Game Alpha Testing
Created: 10/22/23
Tags:
Game Name: Dodge Karts
Role: Artist
For the game prototyping assignment, my partner and I went with a racing theme game under the name Dodge Karts with me being the artist. My programming partner didn't have any real experience with Unity up until now, so I wanted to make things easy and use this as a little tutorial for Unity basics. The basic premise for the game mechanics was you are driving infinitely while dodging obstacles and cars. We were able to get a GitHub page running between us so working together was super easy to do.
The main plan I had laid out for myself was to try and reduce my workload through unity. I did this by creating a custom shader for the car animation sprite sheet and allowed me to change the color of the car while not changing the color of the windshield or tires. The main problems I had were videos of doing this were outdated and didn't show off how to use a png's alpha channel for shader so it would create artifacts to fill in the blank space. I couldn't find a solution until after finding a random post on Reddit saying that I had to split the original png's values and then output the alpha into the final piece.
For the gameplay session, we had mostly positive reviews with most comments focused on the art side as there wasn't much going on. One of the main complaints were the hitboxes for the cars being too big and we figured that would be an issue. All playtesters found the core mechanics to be fun and enjoyable so there is no high incentive to change that area as much. One of the main things planned with future updates are adding more graphics and obstacles to the game and maybe some form of power-up.
