The goal of our game Insomnia was to create a game that demonstrated the frustration that someone deals with when they suffer from insomnia. Insomnia is a 2.5D, top-down shooter. You control a character who can shoot melatonin at things that are bad for your ability to sleep: stimulants, stress, and fears. The goal of the game is to get as much sleep as possible between 8PM and 6AM.

The initial goals of this game were to have the game that currently exists now but with an intensive GUI. We wanted to have eyes that opened and closed in the background describing whether or not you were asleep, a slider representing what time it was and how much time was left, and a vector image of a tree that also grew and shrank depending on your wakefulness level. For our melatonin gun, we wanted to be able to have the player collect pickups for their weapon so that their “melatonin level” could be refilled during the game. The melatonin level would be used by holding down the fire button in order to charge the gun to release a larger projectile.

The goals that we were able to meet resulted in our goals but a much simplified version.     We were able to create all of the sprites that we wanted for our game: spiders, cigarettes, coffee, paperwork (symbolizing stress), and the head of a giant boss who keeps spitting out all of these stressors at you. We were able to create the gun that we needed, though it only shoots one size of bullets for the time being. We were also able to create our minimalistic 2.5D world of a funnel. When enemies or insomnia aggravators make it down the funnel of your thoughts, your wakefulness decreases. Right now this is displayed as the Score but that was not supposed to be the case. We have to work more on the way that time is handled in the game before the score can be properly updated. The score should be increased every time that you make it 30 minutes in game without waking up (having your wakefulness become negative).

In the construction of this game, we ended up using three different asset tools. For our sprites, we used Pickle. For our sound effects, we used bfxr. bfxr lets the user play sound clips that are semi-randomly generated to fit a certain category (pickup, hit, laser, explosion, etc) or lets the user customize their own sounds with a strong level of customization. For our background music, we used Autotracker, a tool that again semi-randomly generates songs. We went through several until we found one that fit the feel of our game.

We spent an unexpected amount of time in creating the sprites for the game. It was much more time consuming than we had originally anticipated but we feel that the effect was worth the time invested. There was also a lot more time than expected invested in the creation of the gun and having it interact with our sprites appropriately.

One of the things that broke at the last minute was one of the areas that we invested a lot of time in: the melatonin gun. When putting the files for the game together, it turned out that the gun didn’t work as expected for our sprites. It works perfectly for removing any object with a RigidBody but when it comes to the sprites it’s a bit tricky. We currently have spheres attached to the sprites so that they will move with the spheres while they roll down the funnel. We think that the issue right now is that the hitbox on the spheres connected to the sprites is just too small currently for the bullets to be able to hit it, no matter how accurately the gun is fired.

Four things that we plan to improve in the game over the next two weeks are as follows:

1. First and foremost, we need to fix the gun. The game has no point without being able to defeat the enemies that you’re faced with.
2. We need to implement the handling of time in game, for both the wakefulness score and for displaying to the user how much time is left.
3. We would like to make it possible for the player to kill the boss, an idea that had escaped our minds but that we have heard several suggestions for. We will need to find a way to make this sufficiently difficult though because part of the game is trying to make it through the 10 hours of in game time.
4. We would also like to make the initial start screen much more visually appealing and make the description of controls much more clear. We realized during a play testing session that we didn’t even mention that the player character can be rotated by moving the mouse. It’d also be much more intuitive to have the firing of the gun be controlled from left click instead of “F”