The Cartomancer

Title Screen
Major Arcana Selection
In the Dungeon

Inspiration

Originally our team wanted to a design a game... and not much else! Our idea came to fruition through brainstorming as we found a topic to bring our game the bones it needed. As DNID majors, our team are all very passionate about game Dev which is why we ended up pursuing a game. We ended on Tarot Cards as a design theme because of a shared interest and a small collection of them used for inspiration for our original art!

What it does

The Cartomancer is a Roguelike Top Down Dungeon crawler, this means that the dungeon is procedurally generated each time you play, and progress is made slowly over successful runs in the dungeon. Fight off enemies and explore each floor to reach the portal at the end to succeed!

How we built it

All the art was done by Abby who led design work on all fronts on the game, doing character design as well as all the spritework and animation sequences you see throughout the game. The pixel art style lends itself to the hackathon format and we are very proud of how our visuals bring our game together! The art was done in Photoshop with some final spritesheet tweaking in Aseprite.

Jagr was responsible for the code development, and used Godot as the platform for the game dev. GDScript is the language that Godot uses and it primarily acts like C# scripting. The procedural dungeon generation is done in a very unique way, generating a room layout by naturally allowing 2D Physics Objects to collide and spread apart, before locking them in place, and filling them in with our custom tileset. We then utilize Prim's algorithm to find the minimum spanning tree and carve connecting hallways to always ensure each dungeon is solvable. You can see this sequence when you first load into the dungeon as the game generates the rooms and carves the corridors right in front of you!

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into when building our project was the sheer time crunch. As a team of two who both had extensive internship duties most of the day Saturday, almost all of our dev time was Saturday evening and Sunday morning. No, we did not sleep XD. Due to having limited time and a limited team, we weren't able to reach all the original lofty goals we had for the game, and thus this became our most challenging card in the deck.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

There are many components to The Cartomancer that we are proud of, but to highlight a few: our beautiful original art as well as the basic animations all being completed within the timeframe, the level of complexity in our procedural room generation, the fact that the gameplay loop is complete, the level of polish we were able to bring with music, sound effects, visual effects, and a start to finish gaming experience.

What we learned

Abby: "I needed to do things in one go, instantly. I would just draw and immediately have to stick with it and export it out since we had such little time to work and so many assets to cram out. It was good practice in prototype drafting!"

Jagr: "Debugging a game is hard. Especially with limited time to playtest or adapt to unforeseen challenges. A lot of original ideas had to be scrapped just cause as a solo dev with a solo artist we didn't have the manpower to contain what our minds wanted to make. It was a good lesson in understanding the deadline and how much time we had to work with."