Dreamcatcher

My Contributions

One of my main contributions to the game was procedural level generation. Inspired by The Binding of Isaac, I wanted the game to feature a series of randomised levels, ensuring no run was the same as the previous one. Once I had a prototype for the level generator, I pitched the idea to my team, and we agreed to implement this system into the game. Levels consisted of pre-made rooms and preset enemy spawns, which were all randomised. For generating special rooms, such as the Boss room, I created a custom tree data structure (since Unity does not support trees), and assigned the possible spawn locations of special rooms based on their distance to the root node, i.e. the room where the player starts. This was done to make sure that the player wouldn’t have to immediately face that particular level’s boss immediately upon spawning, as well as not receiving the maximum amount of upgrades before having even faced one enemy. This, of course, also encouraged the player to explore the level fully, ensuring they interact with our product as much as possible.

I was also somewhat involved with the game’s level design, as well as its visual design. Granted, due to this game not being fully finished and rather just a playable demo, the levels were not nearly as detailed and fleshed out as I personally would have liked them to be before having to submit the game for review. While we did have enough time to produce a playable version of the game, in my opinion we made the scope of this project too big, which resulted in us having less time left over to flesh out the game’s visual and audio aspects, with us mostly focusing on the gameplay aspect.