Pokémon Spiral Dungeon

Inspiration

Our team enjoyed playing Pokémon games during our childhoods. We decided to make our own little Pokémon game to relive those times.

What it does

It's a mini Pokémon game. You get your first Pokémon from an old man, then you venture into a cave conveniently located next to your house. Eventually, you find a legendary Pokémon in the deepest depths of the cave.

How we built it

We borrowed assets from Pokémon Essentials, which itself uses RPG Maker. RPG Maker acted as the framework for our game. From there, we made our own maps, trainers, and events.

Challenges we ran into

• Some of our engine runs on Ruby, which we didn't know about at first.
• We were limited in terms of design and tiling. We had to use external image editing tools to recolor some of our sprites, as well as adding sprites of our own.
• We had numerous issues with audio. Adding custom music was difficult, as well as adjusting the volume of the music (since it usually came out extremely loud).
• Coming up with the trainer names as well as their teams was time consuming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• For the player to get their first Pokémon, we decided to give them a personality quiz and give a Pokémon based on their choices. This differs from the conventional method of simply picking a starter Pokémon. Coming up with the quiz questions and handling the logic for deciding which Pokémon to give was very rewarding to see working.
• One of the rooms contains a puzzle in which the player navigates a slippery ice maze. Creating this puzzle was tricky, but we managed to make one that wasn't too hard but not too obvious either.
• For every level of the cave, we came up with different wild Pokémon encounters which vary in type.

What we learned

We learned the basics of Ruby as well as how to use RPG Maker. We gained enough knowledge about this engine to possibly make our own games with it in the future.

What's next for Pokémon Spiral Dungeon

On our own time, we are going to add more levels and trainers, expand upon our story, and introduce more Pokémon and game mechanics to make it feel more like a Pokémon game.

Built With

• rpg-maker
• rpg-maker-xp
• ruby