Bandit
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Overview
Bandit is a video game that was made in fall 2014 for CSC 281 Interactive Game Design. It was developed in a group of four students that included 2 computer science majors, one art history major, and one psychology major. The original concept was to make a survival game with resource collection, building, and an open environment. Due to time constraints and difficulties of working in a group, the goal of the game became to collect enough resources to fix Bandit's plane and go home.
The game features an infinitely generating forest environment complete with three different intractable resources. The player starts out at the site of a plane crash and must manage their hunger and thirst to stay alive. A small tutorial system is included with the game via dialog from Bandit and objectives of the game are clearly shown on screen. In addition an inventory system allows the player to see what resources they have collected.
My Involvement
Most of the systems in Bandit were programmed by me or with my help. Some of the art was created by one of the group members, but all other art was found online using the allowed resources provided by our professor. The sound effects were created by me using BFXR. During the development process I was the leader of the group, since I had the most game development experience.
My favorite part of the development of Bandit was the infinite random terrain generation. It was the toughest part of the game to get right, but I enjoyed trying something new and I ended up learning a lot about procedural generation. If I had been given more time to develop this game I would have fleshed out the random generation to make more than just forests, but entire biomes and changing environments.
Resource collection was also fun to program. My goal was to give as much player feedback while collecting as I could, which is why I made the resources shake every time they were hit. Doing animations for breaking of rocks and tree falling added a lot to the feel of the game and it was fun to play around with how the resource items were spawned into the game.
The dialog system was one of my better tutorials that I had created for a game at the time. I had seen many games do a similar system and figured it would fit well with Bandit. Some of the obvious issues with the system were that it required the player to read the text and sometimes that text was not displayed for long enough.
Controls
Bandit has pretty simple controls. The goal of the game was to use the mouse for resource collection and inventory management while the keyboard was designated for the movement of bandit around the forest. The game deadline came up quite fast and eating apples had to be done through the keyboard in order to simplify the development.
W - Move Up
A - Move Left
S - Move Down
D - Move Right
E - Eat One Apple From Inventory (must have at least one apple in inventory)
Left Mouse (on resources) - Collect Resources (resource items are collected by moving near them)
Escape - Quit Game (Windows and Mac OSX only)
Bandit is a video game that was made in fall 2014 for CSC 281 Interactive Game Design. It was developed in a group of four students that included 2 computer science majors, one art history major, and one psychology major. The original concept was to make a survival game with resource collection, building, and an open environment. Due to time constraints and difficulties of working in a group, the goal of the game became to collect enough resources to fix Bandit's plane and go home.
The game features an infinitely generating forest environment complete with three different intractable resources. The player starts out at the site of a plane crash and must manage their hunger and thirst to stay alive. A small tutorial system is included with the game via dialog from Bandit and objectives of the game are clearly shown on screen. In addition an inventory system allows the player to see what resources they have collected.
My Involvement
Most of the systems in Bandit were programmed by me or with my help. Some of the art was created by one of the group members, but all other art was found online using the allowed resources provided by our professor. The sound effects were created by me using BFXR. During the development process I was the leader of the group, since I had the most game development experience.
My favorite part of the development of Bandit was the infinite random terrain generation. It was the toughest part of the game to get right, but I enjoyed trying something new and I ended up learning a lot about procedural generation. If I had been given more time to develop this game I would have fleshed out the random generation to make more than just forests, but entire biomes and changing environments.
Resource collection was also fun to program. My goal was to give as much player feedback while collecting as I could, which is why I made the resources shake every time they were hit. Doing animations for breaking of rocks and tree falling added a lot to the feel of the game and it was fun to play around with how the resource items were spawned into the game.
The dialog system was one of my better tutorials that I had created for a game at the time. I had seen many games do a similar system and figured it would fit well with Bandit. Some of the obvious issues with the system were that it required the player to read the text and sometimes that text was not displayed for long enough.
Controls
Bandit has pretty simple controls. The goal of the game was to use the mouse for resource collection and inventory management while the keyboard was designated for the movement of bandit around the forest. The game deadline came up quite fast and eating apples had to be done through the keyboard in order to simplify the development.
W - Move Up
A - Move Left
S - Move Down
D - Move Right
E - Eat One Apple From Inventory (must have at least one apple in inventory)
Left Mouse (on resources) - Collect Resources (resource items are collected by moving near them)
Escape - Quit Game (Windows and Mac OSX only)
Windows
Mac OSX
HTML5
HTML5 is not mobile compatible