Shattered Future

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  Speaking with NPCs

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  Exploring buildings, discovering enemies.

Inspiration

The inspiration for Shattered Future comes from games such as Project Zomboid and many other apocalyptic games. We wanted to not look at a zombie future, however, but examine a future where society has crumbled and people must band together, share what resources they have, and work towards a common goal to not only save themselves, but rebuild society as a whole.

More and more young people are interested in sandbox and open-world games, however many set in a dystopian future are the same zombie apocalypse used over and over again. Shattered Future takes a different approach, looking more into a collapsing society and the effects that has on relationships between people.

What it does

Shattered Future is a game based on giving the player a dark and gloomy feel of what the world has fallen to after the society has fallen to ruin. It is a game that combines both communication and exploring, with combat and action.

Mechanics

Inventory & Loot: Explore buildings and loot storage compartments such as fridges, stoves, cupboards, and cabinets, to find ammunition, food, and medical supplies. The Inventory has a smart sorting system which will ensure items that can be stacked are stacked in piles, and that when looting items it will sort out the way to fit the most amount of items in your limited inventory.

Experience & Leveling Up: By doing things such as fighting and using items, your character gains experience, which allows them to level up - giving them new abilities such as increased maximums on health points.

Combat: Using weapons such as a pistol, the character can fight hostile enemies throughout the map, and use up ammo along the way - making strategy more important as a simple "spray-and-pray" approach would not always prove successful.

Interaction: The player can interact with a wide variety of NPCs throughout the map to learn a little bit more about the back-story behind how the world and this region in particular has fallen into such ruin, while also providing some friendly faces in a forest of hostiles.

How we built it

Shattered Future is built entirely in Java, with art assets created over the course of this weekend. We planned out the idea of the dystopian future, and decided we wanted to mix in a story and communicating with people in this dark world in addition to action and combat. We created a basic framework, and slowly added in features over Saturday and into Sunday.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was time - some of the final systems were not included, such as the crafting system, which would have given more purpose to some of the more miscellaneous items in the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Through it all, we finished plenty of content over the course of this weekend, as we managed to develop our idea much more in comparison to the previous Hack Western. We managed to produce a playable product that can be fun for a little action game put together over the weekend

What we learned

Over this weekend, we both learned quite a bit about design and structuring a game "properly", and learned the value of communication in a team environment. On the programming side, we learned about how to better optimize code for performance but also for legibility for other programmers, by creating more peer-functions, etc. In addition, we learned how to create basic enemy AI, and how to create a proper inventory and loot system.

What's next for Shattered Future

Shattered Future is built with the future in mind, being easily extendable not only from a map and content point of view, but also in the framework, which is built to be very modular and easily expanded on in the future. We have considered continuing and adding multiplayer among other features, however we have not finalized a plan on that just yet.

Built With

• java