Catastrophe

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  Title Screen

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  Second Level

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  First Level

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  Third Level

Inspiration

About a year ago, I was in a digital visualization/media class, and one of our assignments was simply to brainstorm game ideas and make a picture of what it might look like. I love my cat, and I love dungeon crawlers, and my cat is constantly trying to escape my house. So, naturally, a game vision came from that. Over a year later, myself (Alyssa) and my friend Sam combined our coding and my digital art to create a playable rough draft of that very game. Other than small class assignments, neither of us have built a game from the ground up, and we were thrilled with the process and outcome.

What it does

The game is a top-down view of your avatar. Using WASD, you can move throughout the 2-D space, and use J to strike with a sword. Striking enemies with a sword will take off their health counter, and walking into an enemy will deduct from your health counter. There are several rooms to traverse through, with trickier layouts and harder enemies each time.

How I built it

We used the Processing 3 engine, and spin off of Java, to make the code of the system. We also heavily relied on Adobe Photoshop for the imagery of the game. Sam was in charge of coding and I supplemented with my own skills, and I created all of the visuals for the game.

Challenges I ran into

We had several major issues with code that ate up a lot of our limited coding time. Luckily, we had mentors there to help us, so we were able to get over the major hurdles. Unfortunately, that left us with less time to refine visuals and animations, but such is the nature of coding.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Sam and I built our first game, so that's huge. I (Alyssa) personally completed my first hackathon ever, which was also a great experience.

What I learned

I got to learn a new Processing language, and Sam and I both learned a lot from mentors regarding specific issues in 2-D visualization and movement, like object collision.

What's next for Catastrophe

While we love the progress made, it's definitely still a rough draft. We hope to refine the animations with better code and more art frames, create more complex enemy cycles and attacks, add an item/coin system, add a magic/special attack/block system, and possibly change the format of the game to procedurally generate a new map every time the game is played. If it gets to a point for publication, we'd love to see that happen!

Built With

• java
• processing