Full Playthrough:
Game Design:
Lucky Jump is an Endless Runner developed in Adobe Animate during the Fall of 2018. The game was originally developed as a class project but later became a personal project for making pixel animation and sprite sheets. When I started development of Lucky Jump, I had 4+ years of experience with Adobe Animate, I treated the development of Lucky Jump as a testament of all the knowledge I had gained over the years as I have planned to stop working in Animate and move on to UE4 and Unity. My friends Hannah Brown and Scott Ginsberg helped me with the game’s art assets and my friend Phil Nettekoven made the awesome song in the game as well as the sound effects.
By far my favorite Endless Runner ever developed is the infamous app “Flappy Bird”. What I always found interesting about the game was how users would constantly get better at it. At first, they would not be able to get past the first obstacle, but as they got in rhythm with the game, they would eventually get to a point where they would only lose if they lost focus for a quick second. I decided I was going to attempt to improve on the Flappy Bird formula by achieving the following two goals: 1. Make the first few seconds of the game easy to help players get in “rhythm”. 2. Make ways to add to the game’s difficulty as players improve at playing.
Right away, I removed the large pipes that the player tries to avoid in flappy bird. Instead, the gameplay mirrors classic Endless Runners like “Canabalt” by having the player jump from platform to platform but with flappy bird jumping. Since Flappy Bird could jump indefinitely, Lucky (the player character) is limited to five and has to land back on a platform to replenish her jumps. I feel that this gameplay takes the high difficulty out of the start of Flappy Bird but keeps the same additive gameplay.
Now that I made the game easier, I had to add elements into the game to make it more challenging as it goes on. This was done by taking the code that makes the platforms and the two obstacles (Black Cat/ Ladder) and make their variables hinder the player as the game goes on. For example, if you look at the code here:
Animation/Design:
My friend Scott Ginsberg is an artist who recently graduated from NYU. His character Lucky, as seen in the game, is a design he has been developing for some time. However, for the development of Lucky Jump I needed sprites of her jumping, falling, and walking. While he definitely could provide me with these, he ended up being too busy with work and I had to learn how to create sprite sheets on my own.
I ended up using the software “PyxelEdit” and taught myself how to make sprite sheets with it. You’ll see how I took certain liberties with the sprite like removing her top two ears to ease the animation process. I am defiantly not an artist. That said, I’m really happy with how’s these turned out.
Code UML:
Player Animation State Machine Graph:
