Slay the NecromanCEO

A text-based roguelike office crawler about being a goblin, collecting shinies, and fighting through hordes of undead 9-5 workers using enchanted office supplies.

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Who are you people?

We're Leah Johnson and Ara Reighard, and we're both sophomore computer science majors at the University of Kansas.

The two of us are roommates and good friends.

Why did you use this idea?

Both members of our team were in the mood for something retro, and our team has a mutual interest in old roguelikes, so we decided our project for this hackathon would be a procedurally-generated text-based dungeon crawler.

As you'll see later, we carried the retro idea into our design process as well.

Okay but why the CEO and goblin thing?

Good question! We decided early-on that we wanted to do something unique with the game's concept. Dungeons (as in dark, monster-filled stone basements carved into the earth) are a little done-to-death. We went with an office building because they actually share a lot of qualities with a conventional dungeon. They have several floors of increasing importance, multiple medium-sized rooms connected by corridors, somewhat labyrinthine layouts, little hidden trinkets, and lots of creatures you'd really rather not encounter. We had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for this setting - maybe you could find a Vorpal Fountain Pen, or increase your inventory size by finding manila file folders, or fight enemies with names like Lurching Temp and HR Ghoul.

The two of us recently played a TTRPG called GWaFA by Tom Bloom, which is a game where you play as a chaotic little goblin who is completely out of their element. We really enjoyed this game, and our undead office setting seemed perfect for an angry green gremlin like this.

What technology did you use?

This project was made using 100% vanilla Java - no external libraries, no generative AI, and no outside programming tools of any kind (unless you count GitHub and VSCode). If we were making this back in 1995, our development process would have looked pretty similar. It's a shame we don't have a floppy disk to pass this game around on.

This was an intentional decision - both of us wanted to gain a more intimate understanding of Java and game development by creating almost every part of the this project ourselves. While we may have been able to get deeper into development if we had used external tools, we both learned a lot, and we don't regret taking the time to understand the lower-level stuff.

How finished is it?

Fairly finished, actually! There's a whole floor of randomly-generated office space to explore, equippable items and consumables, several enemy types, and the NecromanCEO as a formidable final boss (hehe). That said, there are a lot of ideas for enemies, environments, and items, and progression that we simply didn't have time to implement. We both had a lot of fun developing this, though, so this likely isn't the end for Slay the NecromanCEO.

How do I play it?

There's an executable jar file on the GitHub releases page! Gameplay instructions can be found in the Readme.

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