X to the Y to the Z

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  An enemy Red Grenadier attacking upward

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  Intercepting a Green Grenadier's attack with boost waves

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  A falling tile bridge activated by a lever block

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  A Green Grenadier firing in a long arc

Inspiration

The game is mainly inspired by Cave Story, Lunar Lander, and ASCII roguelikes. And also Skyrim for some reason.

The prompt for the game theme originated from brainstorming ideas for domain name hacks. In particular, inspiration came from the idea of https://x-to-the-y-to-the.xyz, which we registered with Domain.com during Citrus Hack 2019.

What it does

It's a game, what else should we put here? You just need to download the game (from our GitHub repository release page), try it and shoot bug reports to us.

X to the Y to the Z is an ASCII platformer. You are X, and your sidekick Y has been thrown into a deep chasm by the undead Evil Opposing Forces (EOF) of Z. X is an unarmed machine that uses wave-rocket boosters to fly around. Its boosters leave an energy-wave exhaust that pushes things away. It is resistant to most damage, but can be stunned and destroyed by impact and fall damage. The chasm is deep and filled with enemies, explosives, and enemies with explosives. Can you survive to the bottom?

How we built it

We decide to use something we have never used before - the Godot Engine - to realize our idea. Godot is a free, open source game engine that is similar to Unity but with a more lightweight design. We studied the existing platformer demo and spent most of the time writing and debugging our own scripts.

Challenges we ran into

Since we are using an engine that we have never used before, we have to learn everything from scratch. Fortunately, the scripting language has a Python-like and C-like grammar which we are all very familiar with.

We had to work around the limitations of the collision system, since the standard event system was unhelpful for handling most collisions.

We ran into several gotchas with the engine, like local vs global transforms in the node hierarchy and the collision event monitor.

Development ended up moving much slower than expected, due to unseen complications.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully used the Godot Engine to build our first playable game.

What we learned

We gained experience in using game engines for development.

What's next for X to the Y to the Z

The string doesn't end until you reach the Null Terminator.

Website

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/INeedAUniqueUsername/CitrusHack2019/releases

The game's home page: https://x-to-the-y-to-the.xyz

Other domains which we also registered with Domain.com because we are the Borg: https://we-are-the-b.org

Built With

• domain.com
• godot