Description
Set in a pirate-themed world, Cannon Cove follows the adventures of a rogue pirate. The story takes players through a daring heist involving a ship and a castle, leading to a capture and eventual escape with a treasure haul. Use cannons and traditional platformer movement to traverse the high seas and pirate fortresses.
Cannon Cove was a four-week solo project completed as part of my Game Technology course. The assignment challenged us to create a platformer that incorporated a unique gameplay mechanic with a meaningful impact on the experience. For this, I introduced cannons as a core mechanic, drawing inspiration from the Donkey Kong Country series. In my game, players control the trajectory of a cannon that launches their character, adding a dynamic element to navigation.
Level Design
My professor introduced an innovative approach for mapping out levels by using Excel or Google Sheets, where each cell represented a tile from the tile set. This method greatly streamlined the level design process, allowing for efficient layout creation. It also made it easier to incorporate environmental storytelling, as I could quickly visualize and adjust the placement of elements to enhance the game's narrative.
Level 1 Design
Level 2 Design
Level 3 Design
Level 4 Design
Level 5 Design
Game Postmortem
During the development of this project, I encountered two major setbacks, both related to the Unity Tilesets. The first issue, which I was able to resolve, involved player collisions. At times, the player would get caught on the edges of tiles, but once I discovered the option to merge connected tiles, this problem was fixed, and performance improved as a result.
The second collision-related issue was more challenging to solve: the player could fall through the tiles. After some investigation, I identified that the problem stemmed from the collision detection system. I had to switch from discrete to continuous collision checks due to my use of the rigid body component for the player character, which resolved the issue.
A third, unresolved problem was the visual gaps between tiles. As shown in the screenshots below, you can see some artifacts where these gaps or lines appear. I couldn't pinpoint the exact cause, as Unity’s division tool for separating tiles is quite precise. Interestingly, not all tiles exhibit this issue; only certain ones have these visible gaps, which seem to stem from the interaction between tiles.
In-Game Screenshots
Level 1
Level 2
Level 5 Start
