Inspiration
Vampire survivors rougelike games. The urge to have a night out when you know you need to lock in.
What it does
Choose your student and try to make it through the night! Drinks continuously spawn and move towards the player, but you can't spend the night like this when you have an exam tomorrow! The longer you last, the harder it gets, but you can choose different weapons as you continue on.
How we built it
We wrote the entire game within Pico-8, a Lua-based game engine with built-in sprite and sound editors. A VSCode plugin was used to support an external IDE. Autodesk Fusion was used to generate a 3D printable controller design, with an arduino used as a proof-of-concept microcontroller to enable a D-Pad and action buttons.
Challenges we ran into
Only one of us had ever used Pico-8 before and the language is very bare. The rouguelike genre relies a lot on object-oriented mechanics (spawning enemy types, powerups, player info, etc, etc) which are not inherently supported so we had to do it all from scratch ourselves.
Everything is limited! The codespace has a token and character limit so we had to be as optimal as possible. The screen is 128 x 128 pixels and global maps share memory with sprites (8x8 pixels each), and only 16 colours were available to use. It was really difficult to see which changes were the ones we wanted when merging which made bringing everything together so much harder :)
Testing the controller integration with a microcontroller proved difficult to complete within the time constraints. Faults in the circuit design led to lost time rebuilding and constructing circuits, especially with attempting to implement a rudimentary circuit board into the controller.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Cute, scalable game!
What we learned
Gamedev is possible in 24 hrs Quality product design is difficult within 24 hrs, little time to iterate and alter designs from testing and ideation.
What's next for Uni Survivors
Microtransactions in every single menu Dedicated and refined controller support with bespoke PCB to allow maximum space efficiency and performance.
Built With
- pico-8
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