Creature Crusaders

Description

Secret agent animal crusaders are scattered throughout the vast environment of a mysterious island. In order to reunite them together, you have to traverse the islands ahead of you. However, there is a danger on the islands: mosquitos! The mosquitos have captured mythical creatures and are using their blood to perform evil deeds. In order to vanquish this evil, you must find the mythical creatures and free them. But it won’t be so easy. Can you make it through all of the levels and free the mythical creatures, or will the mosquitos forever plague these islands?

At its heart, Creature Crusaders is a platformer level-based game; however, your ability to shapeshift into the different animals you meet along the way makes it more difficult than your average Donkey Kong! Each animal’s special abilities will be matched by an equally challenging obstacle, so you’ll have to be cautious of which order you shapeshift in order to make it through the islands. Creature Crusaders’ fun, engaging gameplay and strategy, lovable characters, and charming visuals are the ultimate platformer experience for all animal lovers!

Controls

You move your character left and right using ‘a’ and ‘d’ respectively (or the left and right arrow keys), and you can jump using the spacebar. When you are a bird, you can press the space bar again while in the air to glide. When you are an animal that can swim, you use the space bar to control your position in the water (press it to go up, release it to sink). When you are the frog, you can use the space bar to double jump. Finally, when you are the cat, use ‘w’ and ‘s’ or the up and down arrows to control the cat’s climbing ability.

Additionally, these controls are also available using the arrow keys and space bar if preferred.

Post-mortem

• There were a lot of things that went correctly in our game.
  •  The way that the animations were put together
  • ALL the artwork and visuals are original
  • The moving platforms and how polished they were
• There were also a number of things that went wrong
  • Art Styles were different and contradicting (detailed backgrounds and flat-cartoon characters)
  • Sprite Sizing 
  • Started with more ideas than we actually had time to implement
  • Underestimated time needed to fix bug involving cat climbing and moving platforms 
• Because of certain issues, there were a few things that needed to be changed in our game
  • Instead of toggling between animals, the player is only able to control one animal at a time. This was to simplify the gameplay
  • We had to cut the water levels from the game to keep the player experience uniform
  • We had to cut the bosses that would have been part of each island due to time constraints
  • The art style had to be changed to a lower resolution to make it more cohesive
  • Originally, we were going to include Tundra levels, but we had to cut the idea due to a lack of time and limited benefits
  • All of the platforms had to be outlined in black and so did the backgrounds. The backgrounds had to be made less detailed to fit with the cartoony style of the characters