BRENTON VAVREK
DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA DESIGN
STREET SCURRY
In late 2023 as an independent personal project for my portfolio, I created a racing game called Street Scurry 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. I previously tinkered with GameSalad in middle school as part of an online training series from the School of Interactive Design, now called the School of Game Design, and so it was enjoyable to return to this development platform with a matured understanding of programming and refined multimedia skills.
The Street Scurry game was designed as a fast-paced racing game where the objective is to achieve the highest score possible during the play session. There is a red sports car that the player can control left and right while dodging white drone cars that are also traveling on the road. As time moves forward there is an increment of 100 points added to the player score, but there is also a fuel drain of 1% for each second of time. Capturing a fuel canister in the road replenishes 10% of the fuel tank and adds a bonus 250 points. These constraints add motivation for the player to gather fuel canisters to continue traveling as well as to incentivize additional fuel capture for extra points. The drone cars can also collide with each other which makes for a fun challenge since pileups can occur randomly and potentially cause the player to crash. Obtaining a high score is both a matter of the player's skill as well as being lucky enough to not get cornered in a car pileup.
The Street Scurry game is currently hosted here on brentonvavrek.digital and is also published on the public GameSalad Arcade website as of early 2024. The game can be played on a desktop or mobile 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. Under consideration is that Street Scurry or a descendant game version might be published as an official iOS mobile application in the future. This possibility is also why the gameplay dimensions were specifically sized for phone screens as part of the initial game design. Implementing different race progression levels with varying themes is a possible expansion of the current baseline game.
On initial play through a brief delay might be observed while the game elements are loading into the web browser.
GAME SCREENSHOTS
Simple gameplay instructions to jump quickly into the action!
Get points for distance traveled and grab canisters for fuel and extra points, but watch out for slower traffic!
Watch the tank level and capture canisters so you don't run out of fuel!
Hitting traffic will end the game, so watch for pileups and see how many points you can accumulate!
GAMESALAD CREATOR SCREENSHOTS
DEVELOPMENT
Developing this game app allowed me to demonstrate a comprehensive snapshot of my current skills and interests within a single effort. An initial consideration was not just coming up with an idea such as a racing game, but also determining how to implement the idea using simple and efficient game design concepts. For example, rather than the player moving through a scrolling pre-planned scene environment layout, the game's racing effect is done by creating an illusion of movement through randomized spawning of oncoming traffic and visuals that have downward velocity within the player's frame of reference. Each gameplay session is therefore a unique experience given the slight timing and spawning variations.
For the user interface, there was thought given to both the placement of display information and the controls. The score was placed at the top of the screen during gameplay as that is an industry standard and is also where attention is drawn since drone cars spawn in that region. The fuel tank display is on the upper-right edge over the foliage where no cars might interfere with its view. Control using 'A' and 'D' keys for desktop play was chosen over the 'left' and 'right' keyboard arrows so that users can control movement with the left hand and recycle game play quickly using mouse clicks with the right hand. The 'A' and 'D' keys are commonly used for PC games, so this is also a familiar control for many potential users. When played on a mobile browser there are large half-screen sized 'left' and 'right' tap control zones.
The process of figuring out all the quirks of the game was a lot of fun and provided me with insight into the process of game design and development. The current version of Street Scurry was tested over many hours to determine if there were any critical bugs in the design or improvements to consider. For example, initial testing revealed some matters where an empty fuel gauge wasn't ending the game with the out-of-fuel scene and the collision boundaries were not tight around the vehicles creating phantom crash events. Those bugs were quickly addressed and now fuel depletion is registered correctly and collision boundaries are tight around the game vehicle objects. Testing also led to some improvements where the car physics was adjusted to add more angular drag so that vehicles don't spin too rediculously upon crashing. The overall randomness of drone car spawning was also tuned such that there is a challenge with pileups occurring frequently enough for added tension.
