Idea: Oswald the Elephant

Inspo Links: http://www.kalonica.com/oswald-the-elephant.html

Overview (Ryan)
We are interested in building Oswald the Elephant because it is a game that I (Ryan) enjoyed playing a couple years ago. Recently I checked to see if the game was still online and to my surprise, it seems to be removed from the Internet completely. I have an Oswald the Elephant itch to scratch and the only way I see to relieve it is to build the game ourselves. The game reminds me of QWOP with slightly, albeit not by much, friendlier controls. The only challenge that exists in the game is to walk until you fall. This doesn’t seem like much of an issue at first but trust me. As soon as you’ve fallen 10 times before the 10m mark you will feel a deep hatred for that stupid Elephant on chopsticks. Despite the rage-inducing mechanics, the game features beautiful art and animation which will be a challenging yet fun bar to reach. The mechanics of the game, including it’ sendless nature, consist mostly of the topics we have covered in class thus far. Austin has prior experience in web animation, Claudia has experience in graphic design and I am a CS major with experience in debugging and translating ideas into useful algorithms and functional programs. I believe with our vast skill set we are up to the task of bringing Oswald back from the dead.

Design (Claudia)
There are three main things for the design/ graphics part of this project:

Oswald the elephant (player): there needs to be a different graphic for every one of his movements. For example, there needs to be a few for when he’s moving, almost falling, and actually falling.
The background (canvas): since we do want the background to move when Oswald is moving, we will be using parallax effect. The background will be a long image that is moving its position slower than Oswald.
The ground (floor): going off the background, we will also be using the parallax effect for the ground. However, it will be moving the same speed as Oswald instead of slower

Mechanics (Austin)
In terms of mechanics, we are envisioning recreating the behavior of Oswald. The goal of Oswald is to keep Oswald the Elephant afloat by balancing him on his stilts. We are envisioning the design of this in roughly 3 objects; the canvas, floor tiles, and the player. While the canvas is a predefined object in p5, we envision the majority of our time spent defining the floor tile and player objects. More specifically however, we see the biggest challenge in developing the interactions between the floor and player objects.

We envision the qualities of the floor object to be a range of X and Y values, whose random selection will create the inclines and slopes that serve as the obstacle. These X and Y values will have to be mapped to a polygon which is either an array of randomized tiles stitched together or a perpetually morphing shape. To assess if the player has fallen, we will track the X Y values of our player. If the X Y values of the player fall outside of a range, being determined by the XY range of floor types, Oswald the Elephant will fall and the game will end. We plan on implementing easing mechanics so that fluidity will enhance the overall feel of the game. We plan on additionally enhancing the game’s fluidity by incorporating parallax movements into the background and foreground. By subtly moving the background and foreground in opposite directions, ideally leveraging easing, the illusion of an extra dimension is created in the eyes of the user.

Sketch:

Potential Challenges:
Having a realistic gravity feel for the player (Oswald)
Background parallax effect
Movements for Oswald

Stay tuned for more updates!!