HARBOR ESCAPE

Team

Individual project

Project Length

3 months

Engine

Phaser 3

Plateform

Web

Roles

Game Designer, Gameplay programmer, 2D Artist, Sound Designer

Harbor Escape is a web platformer made in Phaser engine at the end of my first year.

It’s an individual project made in 3 months where I worked on the entirety of the production, from concept to programming, art and sound.

The first challenge was to grasp this new engine. As I only had a few notions of it and what it could do, I had to figure it out as I went : understanding its limitations, learning how to use the API and getting back into Javascript.

Then, I had to make the avatar move, jump and crouch, be able to pick up items and crates, move them elsewhere and make simple AI enemies that patrol the level.

The main difficulty encountered was dealing with raycasts for enemy detection and to get the hang of it.

Indeed, detecting what was in front of each character wasn’t that hard, but giving this specific area of detection a visible form and color in the shape of a flashlight beam was a bit of a headache.

I’ve also had trouble working with the physics system, making sure the character couldn’t get stuck or put crates in walls which took me many playtests and iterations to fix.

Overall, I had quite some fun working on this project.

For the other fields besides programming, it was mainly a matter of organization.

Deciding priorities, evaluating tasks lengths and choosing what to do each day or week was a big challenge that I did overcome.

What took me the most time was working on the backgrounds and level art for the game. I divided everything in different steps, each time checking if the perspective or colors worked all together before adding more details. That way, I could process further while knowing I wouldn’t have to go back.