Allergy Season
Allergy Season is a fast-paced, one button, physics-based nose defense game in which you must blow away bad allergens to protect your nose from clogging that promotes improvement and beating high scores. For this project, I worked in a group of 3 and programmed all of the gameplay mechanics and implemented UI and models created by other team members.
I coded the touching mechanic to create a ball that expands relatively quick and pushes the allergens away, to the sides, or towards the nose allowing players to interact with the allergens. Originally, there was only one ball and it would change position to where the player touched, but I fixed and adjusted the code to make a ball spawn where the player touched, allowing players to touch multiple areas without removing the effects of other inputs.
I programmed the spawning of the allergens, the effects the good and bad allergens had when interacting with the nose, fail safes incase the spawners or allergens glitched out of place, a score and lives counter and manipulated the gravity to increase as the score increased. Originally, we used a timer with our score, however, we play tested with people and noticed that would aim for higher time than higher score and would push all of the allergens away, good and bad, so we decided to remove the timer to encourage getting more points over surviving for a long time.
Once we got our core gameplay made and tested with positive feedback, we decided to work on adding more features, such as power ups that would give more choices and variety in the game. I created all of the power ups and made their own spawner to separate their spawn rate with the good and bad allergens. We decided to make a slow time power up, where the allergens would fall slower for a few seconds and then go back to going fast. This was a hurdle for me, as the speed of the allergens were based off of gravity, and making the allergens slow down required the gravity to be reversed multiple times its original speed. By keeping the data of the gravity before the power up is activated, I was able to make the power up slow down the allergens by reversing the gravity fast enough to have them stall in place for a moment and switch back to the original gravity making the allergens speed back to normal once the duration ended.
I also implemented many assets to emphasis visual feedback, such as: the nose changing colors when hit by a bad allergen and particle effects when the player touches the screen. We planned on adding more features, as well as more power ups, once our core game was polished, and we wanted to have a local leaderboard to encourage re-playability through competition. Many play testers appreciated the leaderboard I created and would show off to other players their scores.
I created more power ups such as snot allergen that would create a giant "booger" and push away all of the allergens to give the players a small break in the game without ruining the flow. There was a power up that ended up being cut as it had a problem of interrupting the flow of the game severely. This power up would stop all of the allergens in place immediately, but players would be able to push them left or right to reposition them once the power up ended. This power up, unfortunately, caused the allergens to keep spawning, thus piling on top of each other, making it more of a punishment than a reward.
While making power ups, I wanted to have something that was a different type of allergen that could be both an obstacle and a reward/power up. I created an allergen that would spawn multiple smaller good allergens if tapped on by the player and they would explode in random directions. However, if the player did not touch the allergen, and it reaches the nose untouched it would hurt the nose instead. This gave an interesting dynamic between wanting to tap it when it was as close to the nose as possible, but also something to keep in mind while pushing around the other allergens. This became one of the more popular allergens with play testers.
On top of making more variety, we thought our game needed one more core mechanic besides having a variety of allergens and power ups. We decided that the player could tap the nose and it would suck in the allergens even faster and funnel them in making it faster and easier to catch allergens, but at the risk of capturing bad allergens as well. I created the script to increase the gravity by a multitude of its normal gravity speed, which was a similar solution to the slow time power up previously mentioned. Some play testers would try to hold on the nose instead of just tap, making them confused when the effect would end faster than they anticipated. This is something I would love to fix and update in the future.
We published our game on the Google Play store and received positive feedback and listened to any critiques and suggestions from the players. While the process to publish our game on the Google Play store went smooth, we noticed that the UI system was formatted incorrectly on a few different devices, and thus I went in and fixed the issue and updated the game in the same day, which was something new that I had experienced. Creating this mobile game provided lots of knowledge of utilizing Unity in a mobile development process, as well as learning about the importance of UI resizing. I put all of my effort during this project, and I believe that I played a major role in the development of the game and will put even more effort in its post production.
