CAVEMAN SCOUTS

Here is a game I finished during my university degree. I had approximately 8 months to complete the project, alongside completing other modules and projects within my university degree.

The absence of other students wanting to team, resulted in myself choosing to pursue an individual game project.

The game is a rogue-like game, that rewards the player for playing longer, progressing through the levels with 'badges', similar to that seen in modern day scouts. Although, due to time constraints and the desire to create a finished game was my goal, creating a rogue-like game, which incorporated randomly generated levels, but would end as soon as the player collects all of the 'badges' found throught each and every level, by killing the levels boss character.

Within my game, the badge element was something I wanted to introduce into a game as this enables the player to aim for something else, other than just playing the game.

On top of the badges allowing the player to continue and progress onto the next level, the badges also grant the player with a new or better ability. After each boss character is defeated and a badge spawns, they will all have a distinguishable graphic on each badge, outlining exactly is being applied to the player characte, with such abilities being : movement speed increase, weapon firing speed increase, max health increase, and finally a weapon upgrade, allowing the player to fire two projectiles instead of just one.

The boss enemies, as mentioned earlier, will spawn at the last spawned room in the level, to which the boss character will have a different ability every level, however all will get progressively higher in health, and deal more damage. The boss characters will have similar abilities to that of the normal abilities, those being melee, ranged, and summoning attacks.

The game environment is one that I strived to ensure it never being repetative and boring; therefore I created a randomly generated game environment. The game environment will then randomly generate for each new area / level, spawning several rooms, before then allocating the boss room to the last spawned room, and then removing any unusable doors.

As well as the rooms, I coded it so that various environmental objects would have a chance of spawning, also being at a random position within the room. I didn't want too many objects to clutter the environment, so some rocks would be perfect. Also, there is a chance for a 'special' wheel-shaped rock to appear, which will take damage from the player and enemy projectiles, before appearing as a pile of rubble, to which a heart of health will fade into view for the player to pick up and gain health.

Not only are the wheel-shaped rocks an environmental impact of the player, but there are enemy death sprites which are present in rooms, portraying where the player has already been, but also there are environmental impacts with the player weapon projectiles, which when collide with a wall in the rooms, or one of the rocks that spawn, the projectiles sprite will change, portraying the projectile as if it has become lodged in the surface. There is then, as an added touch, particle effects which occur on collision, making the event more believable.