DigiPen Institute of Technology (2021)

Tentative

Tentative is a top-down dungeon crawler. You take control of a mage and must navigate through a randomly generated maze of monsters to fight the boss which lies in the center. Along the way you can upgrade and purchase new spells to help overcome the enemies.

Overview

Tentative is the project I worked on for my first semester at DigiPen. The game is built within a C++ engine provided by the school. The project was worked on for 2 months. I worked on the spell system and the game's UI implementation.

Skills

  • C: The base game is coded within C.
  • Gameplay Programming: I programmed the spell system the player uses. I created the system to adjust the spells damage based on its level, the effects of a number of the spells, and system to unlock all the spells.
  • UI Programming: I implemented the level within the levels itself and the upgrades menu. Since the engine did not support UI natively, I had to program the UI to respond to inputs properly from the player and make sure it was drawn properly.

Team

The team consisted of 3 programmers. I served as a UI and gameplay programmer for the team.

Lessons

  • Mitigations are useful: During the game's development time, one of our team members had to deal with personal emergency, bringing down our team of 3 programmers to two. I worked with the other programmer to delegate their work between ourselves. Luckily, managed to complete all the tasks. However, knowing that this may not be the same case in the future, I learned that having plans to handle the unexpected events and wrenches which life can throw at you during development is important in maintaining stable development.

Demo and Downloads