Gingerbread Escape

Its been forever since my last post, since I was pretty lazy and was busy with school work. I have some big updates. The first is a new website design to show off the games I've made. (www.eng.utah.edu/~kray). The second is the latest game I've made: Gingerbread Escape. The game was made in the Student Club Gamecraft which I was one of the lead programmers for. The premise of the game is that you are a gingerbread man running away from a ginger man. It is an endless runner with the main mechanic is that you can run on the ceiling and the ground.

The game was made in 4 weeks time (with about 5 hrs per week) in Gamemaker. Our team comprised of 5 people: 4 programmers and 1 artist. The reason we went with Gamemaker was that 2 of our programmers were just starting out with introductory Computer Science courses and the other programmer and myself were too busy to use a better language. So for one day per week we all got together on a computer and had a 4 - 5 hour code jam making the game. I provided the code for the main mechanics such as physics and movement and helped out with debugging.

The game was fun to make and was well recieved when presenting it to other Gamecraft members and leadership. We then presented the game at the EAE Open House where it was well recieved. Paige Ashyln, producer on Magnetic by Nature, said, "... most fun game here." and was a big hit with the heads of the EAE program, Bob Kessler and Roger Altizer. They liked it so much that they suggested that we release it to the market. At this point we are still deciding if we want to actually release it to the market. Our hesitation is that if we do, we will have to port the code to the Android and IOS platforms and polish the code so that the game looks like it deserves to be on the market. I'll let you know if we do decide to release.

This game was a lot of fun to make, and I am waiting to see what the future of it is. I am also excited to see what else happens next in Gamecraft. I will try my best to keep you updated next semester and to log my progress with future games and hopefully, future classes that present interesting topics.