Crazy Crane – Group Project – Lead Programmer
Crazy Crane is a one button game in which I worked with a team to develop, the goal is to stack buildings from a swinging crane in an attempt to build a tower to a certain height, the crane would frantically swing faster after each stack and if a bird flew into the crane knocking it. Dropping too many building blocks would result in failure.
I had the role of Lead Programmer for this project and designed and created the main mechanics of the game and all of it’s systems.
I started off by prototyping the games crane swinging mechanic by having the magnet of the crane automatically rotate around the crane cockpit until a collider attached to the magnet collided with another collider that ran across the current position of the cranes bar, once collided it would change rotation direction. I then connected the magnet to the cranes holder by using
I then programmed various sized blocks to appear at the magnets position and have them drop upon the player pressing the button on the gamepad we had for this game.
For the one button aspect of the game we made a makeshift controller that utilises a joystick and a single button, the joystick was for navigating the menu and the button was for the actual gameplay, personally I found it a lot of fun to have a game that uses a different style of hardware for input rather than a traditional mouse and keyboard layout!
I added in crane movement when more blocks are stacked the crane will rise, a life system, camera shake as well as programming the birds that have a random chance to appear and swoop in knocking the crane and increasing it’s speed.
I spent a lot of time working with the artists and implementing models into the scene the way they wanted it to be designed, the Voxel art made a great addition to the wacky nature of the gameplay. Personally I enjoyed the funny looking albeit slightly crazy sun the most so I programmed the sun to always stare at the crane even as it rises to add to the charm.
Connor Howard 