Floppy Taco Reflection

Media Arts Reflection: Floppy Taco

Materials: Computer Based- Photoshop and Flash CC

Date: Monday, May 11th 2015

To make this project, I used a premade template for a game called Flappy Bird, there are many elements such as menus, animated characters and collision code with pictures. To make the different elements, I used Photoshop to create characters and used stock photos as a foundation. I made different pictures to create phases for the moving “taco” and used Cinema 4D to create a more authentic and professional looking menu with 3d text.

At the start of the project, I was told to identify a problem in our society and I chose the stereotypes with the mexican people being referred to their food and them border jumpin. So therefore, I chose a taco to represent the animated character and pictures of borders, buildings and enforcements to represent the obstacles. My ideas changed from a mexican guy to a taco in the middle of the process because it seemed like a more symbolic and known symbol.

The only influence I had for this game is from the maker of flappy bird, for making the game and giving me a good idea on what to do and things I would need.

This game was already templated for me, so therefore there was not a lot of room to change symmetry, game dynamics and playability. I tried to make the scale of obstacles to scale and exaggerate some to give effect. My main emphasis for this project was consistency and making sure it wa sonly the wings of the taco that moved, making sure he remained the same scale.

My main motivation for this assignment, was to create a smooth playing game with interesting and eye catching elements and obstacle, animating the taco as much as possible and making the game fun.

I feel like the game was overall successful, there were a few glitches at the start on figuring out how to import different elements, pictures, etc. But I was able to figure it out and from there on it was very easy. The process of adding pictures to the library surprised me, as I thought code would be needed for variables and such.With more time, I would’ve had wanted to animate some obstacles and make them dynamic in ways, such as moving, shooting and grabbing.

In conclusion, this game was a good example of what it  is like to make a game without actually coding anything. It was a little tedious to figure out, but it all worked out in the end.