Castle Climber is a small, 2-5 minute experience made for my technical design class in my senior year at DigiPen.
DES350 is, for all intensive purposes, a demonstrative project class.
We had no prompt, other than "make a game", and so I created Castle
Climber.
Castle Climber is a momentum-based "parkour" physics platformer that
pays homage to some of my favorite platforming movement options. For
the first project of this class, I wanted to create a fast,
momentum-based movement system for my character controller.
Castle Climber starts the player off in a small tutorial area,
teaching players about the controls and movement mechanics, then shows
a brief cutscene showcasing the threat and the level, and sets the
player loose to complete the stage as quickly as possible. The main
obstacles are the lava and the platforming challenges themselves; the
level is specifically laid out so that skilled players can take a
quicker, more direct route when utilizing better timed movement, while
those who are unconfident or fail at these routes fall to a much
slower path to the finish, putting them at risk of failure.
These were solo projects, so everything was created by hand. Aside from music, which was provided royalty-free by a talented friend of mine, everything in the final project was created by myself and implemented in Unity within the span of two weeks.
As a solo project, all of the implementation was at my sole
discretion. Choosing a project that would be in scope, while taking
multiple other project-based classes in the same semester, was a
challenge. I decided to play off a concept I had submitted in the
200-level version of this course, which was a simple 2D platformer
featuring the same witch with different movement mechanics.
As I wanted to challenge myself to break out of linear movement and
the typical expectations of a simple 2D platformer, learning
acceleration, momentum, and forces was a big focus for me during this
project. I learned a lot about fine-tuning, playtesting, polishing,
and iterative design as I attempted to improve my controller.
The project received a 5/5 in Controls and Camera, 5/5 in Gameplay Systems, 4/5 in UI and UX, and 4/5 in Overall Execution.