Final task

Zuckerberg's Social Media Platformer

For the final task I wanted to create a game that explores different threats and possibilities of social media. For this I came up with few different concepts but ultimately ended up going with a simple platfromer game where I would portray the different social media platforms as enemies. These enemies would kill the player on contact but if the player knew what they were doing they could also use the social medias as jumping platforms to reach places otherwise inaccessible. 

As the main character I waned to use some person linked to social media, someone everyone could recognise immediately. And of course the one person that came to my mind was the man himself Mark Zuckerberg. Him being the creator of one of the biggest social media platforms out there I thought he would fit the role perfectly and so I named the game Zuckerberg's Social Media Platformer.

With this concept in mind I stated working on the game. I made the game using Game Maker Studio 2 because I have fiddled around with it in the past and so I was kind of familiar with the software already. I began by trying to mimic the mechanics of the original Super Mario Bros since I thought that would be an easy place to start off with. The further I got with the development of the game the more I wanted to just make it a shameless parody of Mario and so that's what I did. This way I was able to use some of the readymade Mario assets which sped up the process significantly.

I made all the sprites and animations of the characters using Photoshop. As a base I used the aforementioned Mario sprites but modified them heavily to fit my needs. The backgrounds and blocks stayed for the most part faithful to the Mario series with few tweaks to for example the question mark block.

The programming of course had its problems and pitfalls but overall it went quite smoothly. I found some useful tutorials online to help me on my way and so I was able to learn a lot about Game Maker and its tools and mechanics. I also learn quite a lot of the programming language that Game Maker uses and was able to implement some of the skills I had learned on the Introduction to Programming course earlier this semester.

Exporting the game and getting it to work was probably the biggest hurdle. Being a Mac user exporting the game as an .exe file from my computer was almost impossible. And so I had to use a combination of school computers and the help of few friends to make the damn thing functional. But after hours of intense testing and rebuilding, the game was finally finished and ready to play.

So if you are interested in trying the game out for yourself, you can download it here.