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// Dirty Dog Dayz

Those varmints are at it again! Created on a dare and in a private jam, realize here the unorthodox perspective of man's best friend. Hopefully you will figure out why they love hunting varmints and the nuggets of gold (probably) which come forth in their desperate attempts at evasion.

STATUS: Published On Itch.io

PLATFORM: PC

GENRE: 2d Score Attack, Pac-Man Clone

TEAM (4):

  • Kevin Ritz (Creator, Producer, Animator and 2d Artist of the project)
     

  • Kevin Ward [--ME--] (Gameplay/Systems Engineer, UI/UX Engineer, Sound Design/Engineer)

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ABOUT: 

     Simply download and unzip this small game from Itch.io onto your Windows machine and enjoy a score-attack game like never before, as belligerent rabbits cannot invade your territory without also satisfying your hunger for food.

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Sound Effects

Created in the open source Bfxr and mixed in Audacity

RABBIT CRY

BONE PICK UP

GAME OVER

POOP PICK UP

VICTORY

SECRET ABILITY FIND

Programing

  • Developed core movement system

  • Created timed system for controlling power-ups and relevant interactions between NPCs

  • Wrote animation controllers and physics calculations to determine when NPCs should reverse scaling for animations

  • Established UI links between scenes and procedures for how win/loss cases are communicated between classes to arrive at an end state

  • Implemented music and sound effect managers with dictionary definitions of sounds and attributes to be called from NPC classes at points of death and interaction

  • Created Finite State Machine to handle NPC interactions and to call to other classes that handled animations

Reflection:

  Dirty Dog Dayz was developed over the course of a two day private jam that occurred in late September of 2020. The one rule governing the game's genre was that every member had to build in a genre in which they were almost completely unfamiliar. 2d was my genre, as I had only developed for it once prior and had limited success. Collaborating with Ritz was an opportunity to get my feet wet in these types of games since I had only ever really experienced them on emulations of old 80's arcade titles. Additionally, it was another chance to work within the confines of Covid-19 based restrictions and with little to no contact remote work. Whereas in previous situations I had been alongside colleagues in similar times of day, this time was different. My partner was on the opposite end of my availabilty. This made programming difficult. Unable to rubber duck my bugs against another human and needing to do so in such a short period of time, necessitated that I hone my abilities in timely planning and research. There were few opportunities to make mistakes and be able to correct them later. Everything either had to function now or never. Serving as a valuable lesson in building libraries of my own, I was able to write a few methods of accessing game resources that allowed me to save precious time and speed up the execution time of my code. I very much enjoyed this type of jam and was able to gleam a lot of helpful, small lessons for future forays into 2d and beyond. 

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