IDE: Integrated Dungeon Experience [Game Dev, April Fools]

Inspiration

Our game is inspired by various text-based games 2000s and various roguelikes that have become so popular in the recent decade.

What it does

The game is an ASCII-style roguelike/dungeon crawler. Playing as a humble 'O', your goal is to explore the dungeon, collect powerups to help you fend against countless foe along the IDE halls, and ultimately make your way towards the center to defeat the boss.

How we built it

The game was built using Unity Engine in the editor version 6000.42f1. We compiled a lot of references to different ASCII visual inspirations as a part of our mood board for the graphical design of the game, and relied on a lot of tutorial to implement features we we're all learning about creating for the first time.

Challenges we ran into

A few challenges that we ran into were:

GitHub relating to everyone's accounts where some accounts weren't able to push and pull commits correctly
Movement debugging to make sure nothing was colliding weirdly
Making the enemy AI work with the player and their grid based movement

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're most proud of the enemy AI and its movement, since we had to work around a lot of issues with enemy pathing and movement to incorporate it into our grid-based movement system like a classic RPG. Additionally, we're also proud of the final aesthetic for our game. We started with just a faint idea of maybe pursuing some roguelike, but committing to the ASCII design for our assets, map, and animations was not only a difficult endeavor, but also a very rewarding one once everything came together.

What we learned

We learned a lot about using Git and GitHub with multiple developers, as we ran into various Git push and pull issues with authentication and setting up our repository. We also learned more about creating animations and effects as final touches to make the game feel a bit more special. A focus of our development, especially after our main mechanics were implemented, was to make the game feel as polished as possible. Creating animations and particles among other things really helped to add a final touch to our game.

What's next for IDE: Integrated Dungeon Experience

For future plans of IDE, we would pursue making more eloquent animations and boss battles, as well as creating different special attacks for the player and more items to help the player's expedition through the dungeon.