Fromagic was created in a class focusing mainly on the Juice part of games and it might be the best looking piece currently in my Portfolio because of that. The groundwork for the idea was layed when we wanted to have a easy game concept to juice up. Then we joked arround and decided on a frog with a wizard hat as our protagonist.
Since I did most of the coding the pretty looks of the game are more the responsibility of Catriona Barclay and Junjie Zhang while Artëm Gulyaev is responsible for the soundscape of the game. My responsibilities as stated fall into the coding territory like coding the movement and most of screen actions. Like zooming in and out the camera according to the vertical velocity of the frog or leaving triggers for screenshake to occur. I also was the person getting called when a bug needed fixing leading me to help all around in the project. Like a head not moving when it should have or changing the code for the wall jump mechanic to function properly.
The big theme in developing this game was feeding into audience expectations. In the game the frog eats flies as a small side objective to reaching a goal to the next level. Since it made sense that frogs eat flies. Howerver since there is now an entire eating mechanic in the game there was an expectation to be able to eat other things like fruit or fish that were in the game. Similarly because it was a juice class the environment should react meaningfully with the player. Which made Fromagic a rich game in the end. However not everything was connected and in the final version that everybody in the class got to playtest I tried tieng in eating flies to boost the players jumping ability since there wasnt a big incentive to collect them. This made the player end up jumping too high even after I nerved the scaling severly. On a nicer note in the final version I also got to include super secret bushes that moved when the player charackters tongue touches it.