Zodiac Maze

This is one of our mazes!
This is our ending scene! You can see all the different characters that were created for this game.
This is one of our mazes!
Here is a picture of in game play, as Rat.

Inspiration

Xin Nian Kuai Le! Happy Chinese New Year!! This game is inspired by last week's celebration, Chinese Lunar New Year! This adorable 2D maze game celebrates the tradition of giving hong bao , or red envelopes. Using WASD or arrow keys, help Rat find all his friends in the maze to give them a red envelope! (P.S: It's the Year of the Rat). Each of the 11 mazes represents the other zodiac characters, all of Rat's friends!

What it does

Each opening scene of the maze will show the whole maze so you can see the outline: one of the zodiacs! You might even catch a glimpse of your friendly zodiac in the opening pan. The camera pans into your character, Rat, holding a red envelope. You have 3 minutes to reach the zodiac friend! Using WASD or arrow keys, the player will move in either of the 4 main cardinal directions, complete with animations. The earlier you complete the level, the more points you will receieve. Each level is unique and gets harder as you go. Can you complete all 11 levels?

How we built it

We built the game using Unity. Each level has been mapped out by hand by Kevin, which each level becoming bigger and more tricky. Almost all assets were hand-drawn by Katie. Jerry wrote C# scripts to help camera movement between scenes.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge we ran into is properly setting up our Unity project such that all three of us could collaborate. Unity Teams prevented a Mac user from properly loading and updating the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Katie's super excited to have learned how to animate characters in Unity. Jerry was able to work around the difficulties of using Unity Collaborate and implement game logic and camera zooms.

What we learned

Katie: I learned how to animate in Unity! It requires several frames of your animation and a lot of random clicking on the Unity Editor.

Kevin: I learned how to implement collision boundaries, create C# scripts and coherently put together many levels in a 2D environment.

Jerry: Learned how to implement game logic using Unity! Installation and collaboration involving Unity was tough early on, but we managed to adjust workflow to update our project nicely.

What's next for Zodiac Maze

Audio! Got to love the music and firecracker sounds you hear during CNY!
Decorations! Why not fill in the empty blocks with traditional CNY decorations?
The cat. We wanted to have a cat AI also chase the rat around the maze (similar to pacman). We didn't get to work on the AI enemy, but the overall game seemed perfect without it so maybe this could be a feature on super levels (past the 12 zodiacs?).
Enable multiplayer for one keyboard. One player would be the rat and the other would be the cat and he would track down the rat.
Implement a scoreboard for all local users.