Frank Hawk Devlog

So you may have noticed my lack of CUPdates recently relating to Compass Nays. That's because I took a sidetrack onto creating an endless runner game in Unity for my brother's birthday! Now that I can finally post about it, this will be a mini-blog post before the next CUPdate that showcases my process on this project.

Ever since December of last year, I've been teaching myself Unity for work. So I decided to finally create my own project outside of work in Unity for fun! This was a short project that I finished in under a month, so I didn't have a whole lot of time to dedicate to it.

This game is called Frank Hawk. It's an endless runner skateboarding game where you get to eat tacos.

Backstory

The idea behind this game came from an arc early in The Nays where they visit Frank Lady World, which is a World full of skate parks and skateboarders. And Frank Lady's specialty is making tacos.

The idea of this World was inspired by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, since I used to play that game all the time as a kid (and that's why the music you'll hear are midi versions of the songs from that game). It started out with The Nays just creating characters and levels in the game and eventually turned into a full World where they would skateboard in real life and compete in competitions.

In this game, you play as Chozu, who's a huge fan of this World, as you race through levels created by friends, both current and old, and the ultimate goal is to collect the taco at the end of each level. Each level increases in difficulty and new obstacles show up along the way.

Development

I started out by brainstorming some ideas for a short game that would be fun to make in Unity. Since I've already made a platformer game in Unity before, I figured it wouldn't be too much different to make an endless runner.

Something that's core to my games is making sure there's character dialogue, so I explored the Unity Asset store to try and find a quick and easy dialogue editor, since I didn't want to dedicate a lot of time to building my own from scratch. That's when I found Runia Dev's Dialogue Editor, which worked perfectly for what I needed.

After that, I made the basic character movements and collisions for the hub scene in Frank Lady World where Chozu interacts with characters to enter the levels. Starting out, I was just using sprites I already had or quick sketches as placeholders for the characters.

Then I made the endless runner level. The hub world works like a platformer game where you're not endlessly running, so this was just a quick tweak to make Chozu move on his own. And the actual mechanics were actually a lot easier than I was expecting. I just needed to make a way to end the game and teleport back when you reach the end.

So I made a few scenes like the game over and title screens so that this could feel more like a full game.

Once I had the core mechanics down, I started to create the sprite art for it. Luckily I already had some quick sketches of these characters drawn for Compass Nays, so I just had to clean up those sprites and that meant I was completing the art for that project and this one at the same time!

Once I created the main sprites, I decided to add some various mechanics for each of the characters to move differently in their levels. That included Grenna spinning, Ralphie standing in the way and slowing you down, and Scott shooting projectiles downwards.

Then I started to design each of the stages to be different so they weren't all just clones, and were their own designs. It was really fun to make each of these be unique to the characters and how they acted at this time in the story.

After that, I did some tweaks to make the game more enjoyable and easier to play. So I updated the retry button on the Game Over screen to send the player back to the beginning of the current stage rather than the hub map, so they could retry. I noticed this was needed when the last level ended up being a lot harder than the previous ones, so I didn't want the player to be frustrated from having to redo the conversation before.

And finally, I was able to get to a few of my wishlist ideas! I started by updating the kill object block to be actual lava, since it was previously just a red box. And then I added collectible salsa containers to help lead the player throughout the levels. I also added UI on the screen to tell the player how many salsa bottles they've collected.

Final Thoughts

So overall this was a fun mini-project and I learned a lot more about Unity in the process! There were a few wishlist items I didn't get to like adding more story, custom text boxes, more customized backgrounds, and a few more polish things like animations, but considering I made this in less than a month without a whole lot of prior Unity experience, I'd say I'm fairly happy with how it turned out!

This was also a fun break from the RPG Maker project I've been working on this year, and it felt good to finish a project (since that project is still years away from being close to finished). So this made me think about how I might want to take some breaks from my main project to still have that accomplishment of finishing things, to keep me motivated along the way. Obviously, the Global Game Jam is a huge boost for that, but also it helps to have other smaller projects throughout the year so I don't experience burnout.