Retrovania

title screen
mushroom

Inspiration

Given the retro theme, Shovek and I were inspired to make a retro-style game but with high quality assets and graphics. Since this was our first hackathon, they thought it would be best to try out something new neither of us had tried before, so we decided on game development. Neither of us had any experience in game development prior to this hackathon which made for quite an interesting experience. Shovek is also really into so he was inspired to make the soundtracks for our game.

What it does

We made a survival shooting game, where you are dropped in a 2D world with monsters all around you. The point of the game is to survive for however long as you can. You level overtime, depending on how many monsters you kill, which increases your base statistics. However, the monsters also scale with time and relative to your own player level, so you have to really watch out and try not to get caught in a horde.

How we built it

We started with learning how to use the game development platform known as Unity on Friday by watching a lot of tutorials and trying various different methods to familiarize ourselves with the platform. Unity is a cross-platform game engine, which allows you to make games using a mix of prebuilt UI components and customizable scripts written in C#. Unity also has a vast library of free assets to choose from which allowed us to focus most of our time on the actual coding and gameplay mechanics. This was our first experience with game development, Unity, and C# so it took us a while to get caught up to speed.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the challenges we ran into were due to lack of knowledge about the game engine, C#, and how the two worked together. After running into a LOT of bugs all of Friday/Saturday and fixing them one by one, we felt comfortable enough with the platform to really get a solid product going.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since this was our first ever game, we are very proud of what we were able to accomplish in such a short time frame.

What we learned

We learned how to use Unity, C#, animate various assets, game logic and design, and efficient coding practices.

What's next for Retrovania

Since we still have a lot we didn't get to implement, next up would be items or upgrades that you could buy with some sort of in-game currency to take the gameplay to the next level. There is still a lot of stat balancing to be done to make late game a fun experience.