We Made It Move!

This week our group achieved a big progress. We set up the general layout for the Tiger Trap Game and also made the trap and tiger move! 

This is how our game screen work so far. The tiger changes directions every two seconds. If it hits a wall, it will change direction immediately. The trap only moves when we click or tap on the arrows.

We added the badlogic image on the tiger's feet and the top of the trap. So only when the left badlogic image overlaps with left trap image, right badlogic image overlaps with right trap image, and the trap button is clicked/tapped. For now this game is a bit difficult to play. However, we will work on it later to make it more playable, such as make those rectangles (badlogic image) larger at the beginning level and reduce the size of the rectangles as level goes higher.

Here are some other functions we might add to the Tiger Trap game in the future. 

• We will have the Tiger Trap Currency, which is different from the game score. So players can use those currency to buy items help them for the new level. The currency looks like the bunny logo in the movie
• We will have a loading screen animation
• We will add the pause function to the game
• We might have the bad guy in the movie pops up randomly, if the user trapped him, they will earn a decent amount of currency.
• And some pop-up screen. 

Have a nice Christmas break! ^o^

Design Plan Approved!

Hello everyone! Since last time, we've mostly done prep work. We acquired the movie, we brushed up on game design and pixel art, and we started learning libgdx. Libgdx is an open-source library that allows for easy cross-platform distribution of games. While it's new to us, and our capstone course is about developing Android apps, we want this game to be accessible by as many people as possible.

The big news is that this week, Zach and I met with Estlin Feigley in the Fresh Films office on the Augustana campus. We pitched a general design plan that the entire team came up with through brainstorming. He approved the plan, so we can now begin developing the app and tweak things as we go.

"Tiger Trap" as it appears in Traveling Without Moving

The objective of the game is to make it through as many levels as you can. When you fail, you can quickly start back at level one. Each level has a time limit in which you must capture the tiger, which is moving around the screen on its own, with a trap that you control via arrows on the touch screen. When you have the trap under the tiger, you must hit "trap" before the tiger moves away. Doing so moves you on to the next level, which is more difficult (perhaps due to the tiger moving faster or jumping more, or due to a shorter time limit). Each tiger is worth a certain number of points, which can be used to buy power-ups (perhaps a tranquilizer that slows down the tiger, or an upgrade for your trap that allows it to capture the tiger automatically for a period of time). If you play well enough (say, capturing the tiger very quickly), a mini-game will come up where you can capture as many tigers as you can to boost your points. 

We'd also like to implement an optional tutorial level or demo with a bunny rabbit instead of a tiger. Seem random and silly? Not really. It's a call forward to something more sinister... but that's a topic for another time. You'll just have to stay tuned.

Intro

Welcome to the Tiger Trap blog! Here we will be posting updates about our great project "Tiger Trap." The development team that will be working on this project will be Evan Marzahn, Amiao Gao, Myo Lin, and Zach Peruski. We are all current seniors at Augustana College in Illinois, and computer science majors. This project is for our senior inquiry/capstone course. We will be supervised by our professor, Dr. Forrest Stonedahl.  

This project is a cross-platform app, specifically a game, that goes along with a movie made by Dreaming Tree Films through its non-profit arm, Fresh Films, which has a presence on the Augustana campus. The film is called Traveling Without Moving and Dreaming Tree has given us the honor of developing this wonderful app to help with publicity towards it. In the film, there is a game called "Tiger Trap" and we will be actually creating this game. The objective of the game is to catch a tiger in a trap. The tiger will be jumping around on the screen and the user will have arrows to move the hole along the screen. We will be adding features to this basic idea to make the game as fun and addictive as possible. 

Thank you for visiting our blog and hope you keep up with us as we will be posting at least once each week letting the public know about the progress of the game and the development process.

(From left: Amiao Gao, Myo Lin, Evan Marzahn, Zach Peruski)