Loopy Fire Alarm: Kill Fire Alarms In The Virtual Space

There is a famous saying goes “Art is from real life.” The developer Jiantao developed the game Loopy Fire Alarm based on his real life experience of the fire alarm. The developer lives in a Student Accommodation, where has the fire alarm frequently rings at least 5 times a week, which is a loopy annoying cycle his flat-mates and himself wants to get rid of. Then, the developer made this game. The developer faced the challenge of how to move characters, animation controller, making health bar, transmitting scenes and exporting games. For game graphics, he made 3d models including characters, enemies and shiny bridges by Maya2020. The environment is from his friend’s Ziqiao Wang’s art. The developer finally solved the problem after the help with some tutorials, and the playtest feedback from his friend and classmates also inspired his idea of the game design.

            The developer reaches to the goal of loopy annoying fire and player solving his problem by making a combat system. The developer used four assests of four leg spiders and added a fire alarm for each. He added the sound effect of the fire alarm what he downloaded from YouTube. in to the fire alarm asset. He set a rule for player. The player in the game would act like player should kill all the spiders to make the fire alarm stop, once all spiders with the fire alarm is been eliminated, the player can go to the next level and the game shows finished.

To Make the combat system come to live, he figured out how to move the warrior, attack, as well as making NPC four leg spiders and the background interact with the warrior. Referring to the document moving sprite by professor Alan, he moved the character by using “transform.translate” and “(Input.GetKey(KeyCode).” The developer used animator controller to make the character look like moving with actions. For the script part, the developer refered to the on line document Animator.Set Trigger (Technologies, 2020). To edit the animator controller for Jiaotu, he referred to the tutorial Animator.Set Float (Technologies, 2020). To make the warrior Jiaotu damage enemies, he added the asset mountain flash as the bullet to fly from the warrior and also added damage with the guidance of How To Make A 2D Ranged Combat System (Blackthornprod, 2020). To make the enemy move and damage the character, the developer added the same damage script with the different name to the asset four leg spider (called enemy

soldier in the Unity Project File). To give player a sense of stucking in a loop, he made the spider move in two directions with the help of Xlaught (Xlaugts, 2020). In this case, player can control the warrior to attack the spider and encounter the damage, but it is not enough, players should know if they really lose blood or the spider. Therefore, the developer used Pekkedev’s way (PekkeDev, 2019) of adding health bar to the warrior. He also attached the same health bar and script to the spiders but different names. To make players know they have reached the goal of the game, he made the changing scene by trigger with the help of Jimmy Vegas’ tutorial (HOW TO CHANGE SCENES WITH A TRIGGER IN C# UNITY TUTORIAL, 2019). It is also important to enable players to enter and replay the game, so he made the Main Menu UI and Replay UI by referring Brackeys’ tutorial(START MENU in Unity, 2017).

There were several issues that the developer faced when adding damage to health bar and exporting the game. At the beginning, the character and the spider cannot harm each other. developer checked the video by Blackthornprod (Blackthornprod, 2020) again. He found that the trigger in the box collider in both character and the spiders was not clicked, and that was the reason. After he clicked “trigger”, spiders and the character would lose blood and shown on the health bar. After the developer built and ran the game at the first time. The page shows “memory access out of bounds.” He finally found the solution in the final paragraph of this online tutorial (Uncaught Runtime Error; memory access out of bounds, 2020), which suggested editing player settings-> player-> publishing settings-> enable exceptions set to “Full with Stacktrace.” After he followed this direction, his game was successfully built and run on itch.io smoothly. When the developer’s game was published, he shared his game to others to play test and get inspirational feedbacks.

For the players, nearly all o them can get the feeling of how annoying the fire alrm is, which is the experience that the game produced, at the 

 Reference

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