BFS Unlimited MaxDepth: Blue is player, red is monster, green is exit
RaycastingDDA
Multiple Mazes
BFS Pathfound: Blue is player, Red is monster, Green is exit
Raycasting
DFS
WallRendering
DFS: Longer time period
MazeGen
BFS: Maxdepth included
Flaslight Off experience
THE MONSTERR
General gameplay
Corridoor

Inspiration

We were inspired by The Backrooms movie and the eerie atmosphere of the Backrooms concept. With it being Halloween month, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to build a horror game that captures the tension of navigating an unfamiliar maze while being pursued by a monster. Our goal was to create an immersive first-person experience from a 2D grid-based world, combining procedural generation, raycasting, and enemy AI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a playable escape game with procedurally generated mazes and first-person raycast rendering.
Implemented a monster AI with distinct roaming and pursuit behaviors.
Created a flashlight battery mechanic that changes the monster's pursuit behavior when the battery dies.
Integrated an optional minimap that visualises the monster's BFS route.
Implemented both CPU and GPU renderers and added a self-test to compare their outputs.
Added procedural textures and synthesised audio to establish the game's atmosphere.
Successfully brought all our independently developed components together into a functioning game using Kraken Engine. Seeing the maze generation, rendering, player movement, collision detection, and monster AI work together was one of our biggest accomplishments.

What we learned

Through this project, we gained practical experience with raycasting, grid traversal, maze generation, and graph-search algorithms such as DFS and BFS. We also learned how rendering techniques such as distance-based lighting and falloff affect the visual presentation of a game.

Beyond the technical aspects, we learned the importance of teamwork and collaboration. Dividing the project into smaller components allowed each team member to focus on a specific problem, while integrating those components required us to communicate clearly, define interfaces, and work through compatibility issues together.

As highlighted in our development process, understanding each system was often more challenging than coding it. Building separate prototypes gave everyone a focused problem to learn, while concrete handoffs between components helped us combine our work. We also learned to consider how different systems interact when debugging issues such as rendering artifacts and framework compatibility.

Finally, we learned how gameplay mechanics can work together to create tension. The flashlight battery, for example, is more than a lighting feature: its failure directly changes how aggressively the monster pursues the player.

Built With

c++
metal

Submitted to

CodeRED: Orion

Created by

Worked on MonsterAI, search algos.

Prithvi TM
I worked on the DDA algorithm. I was to provide a list of distances between the player and nearest collision points based on where the player was facing.

durk Martinez
I utilized the distances from durk's DDA algorithm to draw and render walls, lighting it up based on the distance the wall is from the player.

owenmorden
I worked on the maze generation. I made sure the maze was solvable but also random each time. Using a BFS algorithm I also made sure the exit and monster were far enough from the player but also random.

Aliza Khan