Retro Boomin

The Start

We began our process of developing a game by brainstorming ideas and throwing them at the wall. We came up with quite a few games during this process, some with many different versions. In coming up with ideas we moved from the idea of a dungeon, to an endless 3-lane runner, to a maze game. Initially we wanted all these games to fit together in a singular level design, but realized that while some games could fit thematically together, the level design felt too forced and separated. Ultimately we knew some core requirements would be the use of simple pixel art and a simple control system with roughly 5 buttons. We realized though, that many retro game systems/cartridges had multiple games, so we decided to each create distinct games that combined would create a retro feel and still feel unique and enjoyable to play. More games can only be better!

The development

We stayed up all night writing code in python using frameworks like pygame and pyxel to create our individual games. Developing natural menu and pause screens was somewhat difficult, and each project had very unique difficulties which we all collaborated to solve as we individually developed the games. In particular maze design, and ensuring its validity, proved quite difficulty but was eventually solved with new mechanics and validation methods. We are also quite proud of our boss design in the dungeon adventure game, which gives the game a more complete feel to it. In combining our games we ran into unique issues of different main running files, and since we wanted games to exit back to the main menu, code had to be changed to not quit pygame but instead move to a different method and stop the current games operations. We also developed a custom controller input, using single buttons only, giving a physically retro feel to the retro-styled games we designed. We initially considered an AI powered hand sensor, but ultimately scrapped the idea for something more retro and easier to use.

future ideas

Some future additions that we considered adding included a shared coin shops between games, encouraging you to play all of the games, so that you could feel like they were all more connected, without forcing you to play one singular game if you didn't want. We also would have liked to add bosses or more variations to many level designs between games, and, if we had much more time we could have created more games (ideally 10), which would have had more variation and opportunity to try out ideas. It would be even more interesting if there were many local multiplayer games, as they are often more fun to play together, and would be very different stylistically from the (mostly) single player games we created

How to run: open in your favorite editor, run the requirements in a venv. open code base and pick main file to run. have fun!