Journey to Atgaderum was a game prototype made over the course of a 10-week quarter at RIT for a class called 2D Graphics Programming. The game was conceived as a way to combine two different genres of games, one being platforming, and the other being puzzle/resource managing games. The game is a co-op puzzle platformer where each of the two players has a different set of abilities that represents those genres respectively. One player can run and jump and interact with the world. This player must also collect resources from the game world. The other player has a severely limited ability to physically interact with the game world, but instead can build contraptions with the collected resources and can use these contraptions to influence the world indirectly. The two players together can then use their mutually exclusive abilities to accomplish all the tasks the game demands from them cooperatively.
This was a team-based project and my role on the team was team lead. My role involved creating the game concept, organizing the programming and art teams, as well as partaking in the game’s design and programming.
This game had several technical challenges. The most apparent challenge was that the design of the game implied a lot of physical interaction between in-game objects, which necessitated the use of a physics engine. After doing a bit of research, I decided to use the Farseer Physics Engine. I developed some tools that would allow the rest of the team create physics objects and group them together with a visual editor. The editor allowed the team to create all of the level terrain and interactive objects. This was combined with some physics-wrapper code that I added to our engine that would read in the XML output from the editor.
I did a couple other tasks for the game as well. I worked on lots of the game logic (physics objects and contraptions), the ragdoll effect that happens when the runner character dies, the space partitioning system, and the dialog system that spells out the text that the different characters speak.
More info, media, and details on the game team can be found at the Atgaderum website.
