High Jump

Description

A Doodle Jump inspired autoscrolling plattformer created as the final project for the Harvard certificate course "CS50's Introduction to Game Development".

Gameplay and Features

The game is a autoscrolling plattformer in which the player has to keep jumping upwards to reach as high of a score as they can, all while avoiding enemies and collecting powerups. To make the game harder, the window scrolling keeps getting faster. To keep up at high scrolling speeds, the player can perform a stomp to increase their falling speed. There are normal and moving plattforms, enemies are seagulls flying between both sides of the screen and the pickups consist of coins that increase your score, an extra live that protects you from one hit, a stackable multijump that gives you a one time use extra jump while in the air and a slowdown which decreases scrolling speed all spawning with different probabilities. The game features a main screen, a tutorial screen and a death screen with the players score that continues the background scrolling and spawning logic. The increasing scrolling speed controlls score gain and spawning distance and intervalls.

Workflow

The first step was to correctly spawn and despawn the falling platforms. Then, I created the player character, added his automatic jumping movement and made him controlable. Then I added the system for increasing scroll speed based on time and a score for the player that keeps increasing based on the current scroll speed.

After I had the foundation, I kept on adding to the game. First, I added the moving platforms to make the gameplay more interesting. Then, I added the powerups and the enemies.

Lastly, I added the menu, tutorial and game over screen and some other refinements like making the background scroll or making the game keep on scrolling and spawning platforms while the player is in the game over screen. I also made all the graphics in the game myself and tested the game throughout the whole project.

Key takeaways

I am very happy with how it turned out, considering how quickly I managed to finish it, that it was the first complete digital game I did fully on my own and that I only used my knowledge of Love2D and Lua I learned in the course. I think the mechanics work well and there is sufficient risk and reward and skill expression. I managed to keep the game simple to a point where it was relatively easy to implement but the finished product is still very fun to play.

Improvements

I would mainly add more varied content and refine the difficulty to make it feel more consistent.

Info on documentation

Repository will be made public soon.