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
(diving and sliding). For Project 1 of this class, I wanted to create
a fast, momentum-based movement system for my character controller,
and thus the idea of a speed-based time trial.
Castle Climber starts the player off in a small tutorial area, teaches
them the controls, 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 I had to do everything from the art to the programming. Everything was done in Unity and Photoshop over the course of two weeks.
I did not have as much time to work on this as I thought; sandwiched between other project-based classes, I really only had about a week and a half to two weeks out of the six weeks allotted to work on this project. I would say 90% of the in-engine implementation took place in the last 48 hours before the submission, but I am very proud of how this project turned out despite me not having as much time to focus on it as I would have liked.
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.