🎮 Crushing

A survival game where you dodge crushers.

Crushing! is an endless survival game where you control and orb which is surrounded by crushers on all sides, your objective is the guide the orb away from the crushers for as long as possible.

This project was initially just a filler project to give me something to think about over the Christmas break of 2019-20. I had lost a family member and had their funeral shortly after and my mood was not the happiest, especially with my last semester coming up. I was updating my portfolio as I did most breaks, and noticed I had a lack of store released projects. Hence I came up with a simple concept for a mobile game and went about making it.

Initially I was wanted to add all of these amazing features into the game as you tend to think when starting a new project, these included:

• Enemies that would spawn and target you.
• Economy that would be collected as the player moved around the game scene.
• Death recovery, where the player could shield against a crush or recover post death for watching an advert or something.

I made a start on a lot of these features in the early days as well as making a basic movement system where the player could tap and drag the player around to dodge the crushers. While this movement system worked, I would it to not be the best system as the player could easily break out of bounds as well as restricting the view for the player on smaller devices as their finger needed to be on the screen the whole time to move.

Shortly after making a prototype I had to direct my focus back onto my university work as my final major project was coming up. Though I later returned to the project after finishing my degree in early June 2020. This first thing I did was remove most of the code I had already made and refactored the remaining code to use the new standards I had been getting into including namespaces and interfaces.

One of the biggest challenges I had around this time was with the google play services, this was due to it being completely new to me. After watching a few tutorials on the matter I was able to install the plugin and then hit my next problem. When following tutorials you had to authenticate the user before you could use the services, I had it all setup, but it was not working! After a couple of weeks of troubleshooting it turned out to be a build setting that was causing the problem and all was fine.

Overall this was a nice project to work on and allowed me to experiment a little with new features