Inspiration
We wanted to make a Java game, and somehow we settled on the USSR and gulags. We also took some inspiration from Pokemon, especially with how the battles work.
What it does
It is a top-down game based on escaping from a gulag, including random encounters with enemies. Our original plan was: later in the game, both you and your opponents will get stronger, therefore adding more strategy to the game. There are 3 attacks: Punch, Stab, and slash. Punch is a low power move with 100 percent accuracy, while stab is a high power move while having low accuracy. Slash is somewhat in the middle of the two. The fourth move you could do is a magic heal, which can heal you for a turn in the battle, but decreases the amount it heals each time you use it. There is a boss fight, but since the game is unfinished, the boss fight cannot be reached from the game.
How we built it
We coded it in Eclipse and jGRASP. We all worked on different aspects of it, Vinay mostly working on battles with enemies and game mechanics, Kevin working on the incredible graphics, and Viraj and Tharun mostly working on the layout and the main game.
Challenges we ran into
Our code was being very weird and somehow just did the opposite of what we wrote, so we had to rewrite it multiple times. We eventually had to modify our original idea of having specific enemies around the map, as that didn't work. With the short amount of time we had, we decided to create a "demo" version for potentially future improvements with the rest of the features we wanted. We also originally tried to deploy it as a webapp, but that did not work because we could not set up a server to use with the jar file we had created. Therefore, we decided to leave it as a .java file instead of putting it on our website. This way, we could also easily demonstrate some features that didn't make it into the final product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to overcome our difficulties in our code, and ended up making a working product to be able to present today.
What we learned
How to solve problems in the face of difficult situations, and to persevere through a long and tedious process
What's next for Escape from Stalin
First, we want to go back to our original idea of where there are different enemies spread around the map, instead of random encounters. That way, we can scale up the difficulty of the battles as the character gets new weapons and attacks.We want to add more to the map and probably an upgrading system for weapons. Eventually, we want the user to be able to pick between different weapons and attacks.
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