Project Description
Getting Over It 2021 was an attempt to create a similar game to the popular Getting Over it With Bennet Foddy, released in 2017. The central mechanic involving movement through an increasingly complex obstacle course using a weighted stick, though this went through several design changes
over the course of the project.
User Testing
Limited user testing was possible, as issues with the movement of final version couldn’t be resolved in time. However, some degree of novelty was obtained by turning up Restitution, the part of the Gamemaker physics engine related to making objects bouncier. This caused the player to fly around the screen at increasingly rapid speeds, eliciting amusement from both the people involved in testing.
Evaluation and Reflection
Though the game remains mostly unfinished, certain functions and mechanics are completed and work more-or-less as intended. While in the most recent version proper movement is impossible due to the unexpected complexity of the physics engine, the older version functions fine and is aplayable game. Multiple problems were encountered during the production of this game, mostly in relation to the physics engine and collision. Initially, I couldn’t find a way to attach the “player”, in the form of a box, to the stick, allowing for gameplay more accurate to the original Getting Over It. Eventually, the stick was made the player character instead, with no box attached.
Regarding collisions, the player character would fail to collide with the walls themselves, rather stopping a few pixels away. While
this would eventually be fixed, the player could still come to a complete stop if it landed on a wall’s edge on an angle, something that was implemented into the design of several levels later in the
older version of the game. Additionally, the player’s rotation was mapped to using the left and right shift keys in this version, which unfortunately ran into the issue of the Windows Sticky Keys prompt appearing at random, which could not be turned off on the school computer.
After Rob helped regarding the issue of attaching the character to the stick and properly using Gamemaker’s physics engine, the issues became more with the effective use of said engine. Unfortunately, despite messing with the physics engine for several hours I was unable to make it function as desired. If I were to start this game over, I probably would have focused more on the programmed physics rather than the inbuilt system – while I do feel I understand it more than I did before, it was ultimately a massive timesink with little to no payoff. And while the version of the game pre-revision was further from the inspiration than I originally intended, it was at least a functional game.
