Inspiration

Our game is called Space Mole 2. When we were brain storming ideas for the project we looked through ideas for each theme, and one of our members thought of a game called Dome Keeper link. Dome keeper involves underground moon exploration, so we decided to make our own game about space mining and connecting it the theme of aerospace.

What it does

It will be a rogue like game where you get upgrades and try to survive as long as possible with periodic enemy waves. The gameplay loop will be as follows: First you arrive to a moon, you try to gather resources through a mining system and bring them back to your starting location (Base) to get upgrades. However, every few minutes an enemy wave will come, so the player needs to balance mining and upgrading defenses.

How we built it

We programmed the game in basic java swing using IntelliJ as the IDE. It was important to us that we understand our project, so we decided to use Ai for educational purposes. Even though that Java Swing is relative low level the simplicity of our game was a good fit for the library, we chose Swing because of this. With things like LibGDX (another java game library), they provide many tools for making complex games, they also have a complex nature themselves.

Challenges we ran into

After first deciding on how to make a game, we attempted to use the java library LibGDX to build the game, which has game engine tools that would let us implement special features. However, after 3 hours of looking into starting the game structure and programming we made a crucial realization, if we decided to use LibGDX we would have to vibe code the entire project. The complexity of LibGDX made it impossible to build a game with it in only two days. So, we made the decision to focus on personal understanding of the project rather then pure quality, and switched to the much simpler java swing. This switch caused us the biggest hurdle we had to go through when developing our game, the simple race against the clock to rebuild the code after losing about 3 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we did not use AI as a crutch. We did use it for help on the collisions, but only in a teaching capacity.

What we learned

After completing our project, we can say that we learned much from this project. On a obvious note, we improved at coding with java swing, as we have never used it before, however we also grew in terms of java logic and problem solving as well, thanks to us coding it almost entirely ourselves. But aside from that, we also learned a valuable lesson about taking pride in your work. It would have been easy for us to stick with LibGDX and vibe code a very functional and neat game. But, instead we decided to restart and code it ourselves even though the end result wouldn't be as refined, as a result we all appreciate and like our game a lot more.

What's next for Space Mole 2

In all there is a lot more features we would have liked to add to the game to improve on it . From a game mechanics perspective, we would have loved to add mining upgrades to add some (insert) to the mining system. But we would have also liked to add to the story a bit more, and provide more direct connection to the idea that greed always results in tragedy. For example: showing how the resource mining impacts the planet the game takes place on.