Making the scan minigame

Hey everyone!

A few days ago, I added another minigame to the game.  And this minigame will be part of the Doctors story.

The game itself can be found at Captains Room. Remember that green screen there? Well, now you can click on it and see what's it all about!

And this is what I made!

Now the green screen shows a 'scanner', which the Captain uses to scan the space-enviorments before starting a recue operation. And of course, at some point in the story Keen will have reasons to do the same.   

Coding the gameplay

Now, in terms of gameplay I thought it would be fun to let you really scan the screen in order to find things (much like the classic 'Battleship'-boardgame).  So that's what you will have to do.

Now it so happened that Rob  (who coded  the previous 2 minigames) wasn't available this time. So I took on the challenge to code this game myself  :) Of course there is no way I can do any advanced coding yet. But The logic of this game is actually no different then that of any other game-screen in game. Because this minigame is really all about 'pointing & clicking'!

So here you see a bit of my creative coding for this minigame...

I'm not sure if it's readable for you like this, but what you might notice here is that I added a sound effect when you hover your mouse over a trigger area. I never did this before, but this will effectively help you to find things on the screen. Because the sound acts as a hint. 

Now I'd love to show you more about the actual gameplay... but that will also show the solution to this 'scan-puzzle'.  So I can't really do that :) 

Making the art

But what I can do, is show you how I made the art for this minigame.

My starting point was of course, the green screen in the Captains Room. This was helpful to determine how the game should look, but at the same time the green screen also looked very flat and boring in close up.

So to make it all a bit more interesting, I added the joysticks at the bottom and I placed Keen in the screen as well. Later on  I also decided to make a seperate, more detailed 'start screen', to avoid showing an  'empty grid' all the time (which is needed for the gameplay).

Next!

Well, I hope to release another game-update in the next few days; so then you can play the minigame yourself.

And of course, then I'd love to hear what you think of it! :)



All the best!

-Robin