Paper Prototype
Coming soon! (ETA 2022)
A mobile puzzle platformer built in a custom Java game engine while I was studying computer science. Includes a full mobile level editor that was used to make the actual in-game levels. Currently in open beta, check it out on Google Play.
Development Timeline
Development of Paper Prototype started towards the end of 2019 when I was studying first year computer graphics at Victoria University. In that paper we were introduced to a computer graphics sandbox application called Processing which has its own simple IDE and uses a simplified version of Java. I greatly enjoyed the simplicity of experimenting in Processing at the time, no main method or application setup was required to get something up and running and I started playing around with the mobile Android version APDE in my spare time when I was away from my computer.
During my second year of study, I started developing a level editor using only my phone, writing all the code in Java using the touchscreen keyboard. It was slow work, but fun and a great way to try out new concepts as I learned them. Since the editor came before any playtesting of actual game ideas, it emerged in quite a freeform way and a lot of unusual gameplay assumptions I made early on became deeply embedded into the codebase.
I was never planning to release a game in my terrible, coded on a phone, engine, but by the last year of my degree I had put so much work into it that I’d become somewhat irrationally invested and I decided to polish it into a full game. That should only take a couple of months, right? It very quickly became clear that I couldn’t finish coding the game on my phone, the number of classes had become unmanageable with the GUI of the mobile IDE (see pictures below) and APDE had a bug where coloured text would start to drift off centre the more classes the project contained.
Eventually I ported the codebase to Android studio and have been gruellingly trying to extend and finish an engine that was implemented by a first year student with gameplay that was completely determined by what would be interesting to code. It has been an interesting, and frustrating, challenge, but I have learned a lot about how not to make games in the process. Needless to say, I’m very much looking forward to going back to Unity.
