Since this was my first programming project, I decided to make something that would challenge and entertain me. Fitting both of these, I made a platformer game inspired by a cartoon I enjoy. With this I was able to further develop my understanding of programming and attempt game design. Both concepts I am fairly new to. 

This game, as mentioned above, is a platformer game based off of Adventure Time. Specifically, there is an episode titled Guardians of Sunshine where the main characters, Finn and Jake, go into their game console, BMO, and attempt to beat the game. 

Based off this, my game consists of three levels where the user plays as BMO. The user then has to be careful of the enemies which are animated, bullet spitting frogs. As the user progresses through the game, the number of enemies also increases, making the games difficulty increase. Additionally, the user has to collect all three apples, where if all are collected, they would then win the game. 

The most important feature of my game was to have a character be able to move around, jump, and land on the platforms. By having these basic features the games core was set. Afterwords, I focused on designing the characters and items. Since this was based on a cartoon, I used those images as guides while drawing my characters. Then, I just added the animation I wanted for each. For example, BMO has a walking animation that is activated each time the 'a' and 'd' keys are pressed. Lastly, I added sound that is heard when the character jumps, punches, or collects. There is also background music that correlates with what is happening. When the user looses, the sound is much more dark and obnoxious while when the user wins, the sound is livelier. 

Overall, this was a really fun game to work on. It allowed me to explore new styles and concepts of programming. As I also enjoy design work, it was interesting to see how design works in game programming and how different it would be then regular design. This was also my first time creating animations. Although challenging at first, I was able to roughly learn the basics and create some animations for my game. As seen below, I made the floating golden apple, bullet spitting frogs, and the character BMO.