Hopper

Development Info

Genre: Action

Development time: 4 months

Game Engine: Unreal Engine

Platform: PC

Team size: 1

Responsibilities

Designed the levels seen in the game
Designed and developed the obstacles and power ups used in the game.
Developed player mechanics and other key systems for the game.
Made an instructional document meant for younger kids to use to make their own game.

In Hopper, you take control of a little robot and play your way through multiple levels in this Frogger-inspired game. Just like in Frogger, the goal of the game is to guide the player character to 5 spots at the end of the level while avoiding obstacles.

Player Character

The player character is a four legged robot that can only hop in four directions.

Obstacles

Saw Bot

The Saw Bot is an obstacle that moves across the screen horizontally

Roller Bot

The Roller Bot is an obstacle that moves across the screen vertically.

Missile Launcher

The Missile Launcher is an obstacle that continuously shoots missiles after a set time.

Hover Tank

The Hover Tank is an obstacle that moves horizontally across the screen slowly and continuously shoots missiles after a set time.

Laser Ring Turret

The Laser Ring Turret is an obstacle that shoots laser rings that grow in size overtime

Spike Trap

The Spike Trap is an obstacle that goes up and down into the ground after a set amount of time.

Crusher

The Crusher is an obstacle that can either come down from the sky or across the screen with another Crusher to crush the player character.

Laser Wall

The Laser Wall is an obstacle meant to block off sections of the level from the player. The Laser Wall can be turned off if the player lands on its connected button.

Falling Platform

The Falling Platform is an obstacle that will fall once the player stops touching it. This will leave gaps in the level, making it harder for the player to navigate.

Shark Bot

The Shark is an obstacle that moves across the screen both vertically and horizontally

Pickups & Key Sytems

1 UP

The 1 UP gives the player another live

Time UP

The Time Up increases the amount of time the player has before they automatically lose a live.

Bubble Shield

The Bubble Shield will prevent the player from taking obstacle damage once.

Home

The Home is the player's objective in the game. The player has to reach five Homes to progress to the next level.

Instructional Document

For this project, I was also tasked with making an instructional document with detailed instructions on how to make a Frogger-like game. In this document, I have code breakdowns on key features, and I go over the core elements of the game.

Postmortem

Hopper was the first game I made for a job, and I had a fun time making it. Looking back on it, the one thing I would change is how I set up the levels. At the beginning of the project, I used large cube meshes to make the levels. This made planning obstacles and pickup placements tedious because I would have to constantly test and line them up to ensure that the player could get to pickups or avoid obstacles properly. Later in the project, I made a level that consisted of floating blocks that the player had to jump across. I found that this floating block format made it much easier to set up obstacles and pickups, and made it easier to tweak the player movement. I found that the later levels created with the floating block format were better than the earlier levels, and I wished that I had used the floating block format when I first started working on levels for the project.

If you want to try the game out then click the button down below to download it off of itch.io

Click Here To Download