BRENTON VAVREK
DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA DESIGN
COLOR CAVE
In 2024 as a project for my Digital Multimedia Design (DMD) upper-level course, I created a demo edutainment game called Color Cave using the GameSalad creator application. GameSalad is a visual authoring tool used to create and publish cross-platform arcade games for desktop and mobile devices. Included are advanced constructs that allow creators to define mathematical expressions, rigid body physics parameters, and logical object behavior attributes. This is also the authoring tool used for my first published game Street Scurry done in 2023.
As prescribed by the DMD 300 course and project rubric, all the images used in the Color Cave creation were done using artificial intelligence (AI) prompt engineering to create backgrounds, objects, and character animation frames. This objective was to both introduce and apply the use of AI to creative projects. The online Microsoft Designer Image Creator application was the primary AI image generation tool used for this Color Cave project. The custom themed score was created by myself using the Hookpad online music sequencer and sound effects were done using Audiogen.
Color Cave was designed as a browser-based platform edutainment game where the objective is both learn about the color wheel and have fun navigating cave mazes. A highest-level achievement is recorded each play through and one can continuously make attempts to break their previous session record. The goal each level is to find the golden shrine, answer the mini-game color wheel question correctly, and escape through the level exit without being struck by cave critters. The game play control is simple with the [A] and [D] keyboard moving the main character left and right while the space bar is used to jump. The interactive shrines are point-and-click to choose answers. If a cave critter is contacted, you will lose your suit color as a warning that character health is depleted. If a cave critter strikes you a second time, the game ends. Obtaining a highest-level record is both a matter of the player's game play skills as well as their color wheel knowledge.
The Color Cave game is currently hosted here on brentonvavrek.digital and is also published on the public GameSalad Arcade website as of middle 2024. The game can only be played on a desktop web browser at this time. To minimize the impact of iOS/Safari browsers requiring user interaction before a website sound is played, I added my own custom splash screen based on a GameSalad recommended workaround to initiate an interaction and restart the GameSalad audio engine at launch. A descendant or future Color Cave game version might implement and offer different difficulty settings for both the game play and the color questions.
On initial play through a brief delay might be observed while the game elements are loading into the web browser.
PC keyboard & mouse support only at this time.
GAME SCREENSHOTS
Splash screen introduction.
Be sure to run on a PC with a keyboard & mouse!
Simple gameplay instructions to jump quickly into the action.
Just press the Start button!
Mesmerizing level segways!
Find the golden shrines and answer color questions to escape the current level and advance.
Avoid the cave critter beasties!
Shrines test your color wheel knowledge.
Seek another shrine if you fail to answer correctly!
A single strike of a cave critter will remove your color and a second strike will end the game.
GAME PLAY VIDEO
Press the play button below to start the video.
DEVELOPMENT
Developing this multi-level edutainment game allowed me to hone more advanced programming and creative skills. Using artificial intelligence (AI) as a core aspect of the imagery was both fascinating and frustrating at times. The fascinating aspects were how quickly the use of AI could generate imagery that was detailed and ready-to-use. The frustrating aspects of AI came with prompt engineering and the need to iterate many times to get a usable result, but even then the AI would not always follow the exact instructions for how an image should be created and so some digital artistic tweaks needed performed in some cases.
Generating a semi-random map and shrine location each play through was an added challenge for keeping Color Cave levels fresh each attempt. A fully randomized set of floors and walls, along with endlessly randomized shrine location possibilities, would have been the ideal game implementation. Due to the complexities of coding such a robust randominization in GameSalad and balancing the requirement to complete a finished product within only part of a semester, the final level randomization solution was instead a compromized idea. The solution implemented was that there is a base maze that is the same level-to-level, however there are multiple ancient temple columns that will appear in random locations to alter the viable journey paths throughout the game map. Likewise, the shrines have finite locations that are randomly chosen in each level play through. The mini-game shrine color wheel questions used a randomizer table that allowed for permuted selection of a question and its associated answer choices so that a valid interactive construct is always presented (i.e. where a color question has one and only one answer presented in the choices).
