LET ME EAT MY LUNCH!

My Autobiographical Bitmap Game

Game Description and Storyboard

For this assignment, I decided to make my bitmap game based on when I encountered bullying in 1st grade during lunch because my Japanese food was different from my classmates’. This was one of the few times I encountered racism living in America, so it is one of those memories I can’t and will never forget.

I made the main character that represents me in first grade a cute teddy bear, and the bullies are three different colored cats. I chose animals to replace me and the bullies because it’s easier to talk about race through cute animals.

As you can see from my storyboard, there are 3 parts to my game: the bear running to a lunch table while avoiding the bullies, the bear swatting the bully’s hands away from their lunch, and the bear eating their own lunch while avoiding mean and hurtful words from the bullies. I was also going to add a transition scene between the opening scene and my first game, but my code ran too long and I was unsure how to create dialogue within my game.

All illustrations throughout my game were created on Adobe Illustrator. Since it’s a bitmap game, I pixelated the illustrations. I also chose background music and sound effects that went along with the bitgame theme.

For the first game, I created multiple lunch tables that acted as obstacles that the bear had to avoid. On the side and in the middle are the 3 bullies, each pacing back and forth at different speeds. The goal of this particular game is to sit at the otherside of the cafeteria without running into the bullies. If the bear ran into one of the bully’s, it lost a life. This game was difficult to create since the bear kept going through the lunch tables. So I asked Elena for help, and they taught me how to use CreateGraphics that basically creates a stamp of a particular group of shapes. Through this, we were able to set boundaries for each table so that the bear would bounce back once it hit the lunch table.

The second game was a little less challenging, since it was similar to creating a pong game. The bully’s arm would bounce up and down, and if it hit the lunch in the middle of the canvas, a life would be deducted. The bear’s arm is made to move left and right to swat the bully’s hand away, and there is a sound effect that plays when the bear’s arm hits the bully’s arm. There’s actually a glitch in this game that I was unable to fix. Whenever the bear’s arm would overlap with the bully’s arm, it would get stuck, which would increase the score and move on to the next stage. I was able to receive help from Jon, and even though we weren’t able to figure out how to avoid the glitch, it gave me the idea to make the bear’s arm barely touch the bully’s arm so that it would avoid overlapping. This kind of works, and decreases the chance of the arms overlapping.

Lastly, for the final stage, the bear has to move its hand and lunch through mean and hurtful words that move across the screen. When the food goes into the bear’s mouth, the arm and food is reset back to its starting position. This game was probably the least challenging to create. However, there were a lot of illustrations to make for this one which made it more time consuming than the others.

I also created a game over and hooray! scenes. Whenever the player loses, the scene jumps to the game over page, which counts down from 5 and transfers to the opening page. This was really difficult to achieve. I initially wanted to create a play again button, but the button would confuse itself with the “click me to play” button from the opening scene so I decided to replace it with a timer for the game over page. The hooray scene was easier to create, and I added some confetti to celebrate the player’s win!

Assignment Reflection

Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment. I think it really tested the knowledge I’ve accumulated so far in this class, and I feel pretty good about what I’ve learned since September. It also helped that we had 3 weeks to complete this assignment. I was able to time manage pretty well, although there were some problems that arose last minute. Many of my friends also played the game for me and gave me some feedback, so I was able to improve many aspects of my game. One thing I really want to add is the transition scene between the opening scene and the first game, so I will be working on this game throughout the semester!