Mima's Adventure is a short 2D side-scrolling game starring Mima, a rice ball who is on a journey to reclaim their stolen fries. You can download the game here! (Make sure to have Processing installed in order to run this version.) Mima's Adventure
CONTEXT
Genre: Action, Platformer Team Size: 1 Platform: PC (Windows) Development Time: March - April 2021 Tools Used: Processing (Game Engine), Aseprite (Artwork), FL Studio (Music, Sound Effects) Mima's Adventure was a solo academic project I completed at Simon Fraser University within four weeks. I was responsible for writing the code in Processing, creating the art using Clip Studio Paint and Aseprite, and composing the music in FL Studio.
A playthrough of the game with my commentary over it.
OBJECTIVE & PLANNING
As our final project our goal was to create a game demonstrating what we've learned from our programming class.
With four weeks to create a game, I decided it would be best to create a game with a simple premise and plot, so that a majority of my time could be spent working on the gameplay. The game would be a side scrolling platformer, with the main mechanics I wanted to allow players to do on top of the basic run and jump were a dash, double jump, and the ability to interact with objects and NPCs.
A sketch and finalized version of the logo for the game, designed by me. Sketched in Clip Studio Paint and finalized in Aseprite.
DEVELOPMENT
After submitting my proposal, I immediately set out to work on the game's foundations, such as basic movement, gravity, and enemy AI. To focus most of my time on this, I quickly created placeholder sprites to get a basic idea of how the game would look and had little to no issue scrapping anything in case it didn’t work out the way I thought it would.
An interesting bug that came up during development was that when Mima jumped on the heads of multiple enemies at once, it would cause them to go extremely high in the air; I believe this was because when an enemy was stomped on, they gave Mima a velocity upwards and so when multiple enemies are stomped on they would each give Mima more and more velocity resulting in the bug. I thought this would be interesting to have as a level gimmick, so I made one of the four levels that require you to take advantage of this, along with placing a sign that contains information about it.
ISSUES
Given the frame time of around a month, a majority of my time was spent coding, bug fixing and giving the game proper sprites I had little to no time to work on the music for the game. This resulted in me using previously made work such as covers of other songs and very short originals.
CONCLUSION
Despite the time constraint preventing me from being able to create all the assets from scratch, I still found that Mima’s Adventure was an excellent venture that reaffirmed my judgement on what to prioritize when solo developing a game, with coding being the main priority with art and music following that. Thanks to this my TA even recommended me to send the project to my professor if a SFU Showcase was happening that year.
Mima has been a character I have drawn for many years and hold dear to my heart, so I hope to one day recreate this game and give the character the game it truly deserves.
Sketches of planned game mechanics as well as the narration for the game.
Screenshots of Mima’s Adventure while in development (Left) and finished (Right). Sprites were created in Aesprite.
Various placeholder sprites placed beside their finalized counterparts. (All sprites were created in Aseprite).
