Table of contents
Why was this game made?
Quinnipiac University has a course named SER225 Intro to Software Development. In this course, students are broken up into teams and are tasked with expanding upon an already existing open-source codebase. The codebase chosen is typically a game created by an upperclassman Quinnipiac student/alumni, and there have been several games used before this one including Tank Wars, Judgement, and the Wave Game. This game was created to be the next game used for the course. The game is an intentionally simple platformer game engine that can be built upon. The game engine was created to be as modular and flexible as possible to support each team of students in being able to progress the game in their chosen direction.
When was this game made?
I forget when it exactly happened, but I had a conversation with the previous professors that taught this course, and he asked me if I wanted to create the next SER225 game. I think this was in the Fall 2019 semester. So I had quite some time to work on the game, which needed to be done by the first day of the Fall 2020 semester.
And in the blink of an eye, the year I had to work on the game was gone. I was so busy with finishing grad school, working, and teaching that I only was able to get a few things started around May, where I created a “simple game engine” to test out some ideas, and even used it for a class assignment in the Spring 2020 semester. The repo for that precursor simple game engine can be found here.
So…well I waited until the last minute to start working on the game again. Before you judge me, I swear I must have entered a time warp or something, because one second I had like a year to get this game done, and then the next second I have like three weeks left. Nothing you will say will convince me otherwise, that time was somehow stolen from me.
I started working on the game again in August and basically shotgunned out the rest of it in a couple of weeks. That not only includes writing the code, but also creating all the art, testing everything many times over, and documenting everything on this website. It was A LOT of work…
The game has now been used for several iterations of the SER225 course, and will continue to be used for the forseeable future as I am now the instructor of the course. Before each semester starts, I do some more work to the codebase to make things a bit tighter and organized, in order to give my students a better experience working with it.
The “other” game
Prior to the Fall 2022 semester starting, while planning for the course, I impulsively out of nowhere wanted to see if I could transform this platformer game into an RPG (role-playing game) while changing as little of the code as possible.
Surprisingly…things started working out, and then I got super into it, and then…well now there are two games. It ended up being a lot more work than I had initially intended, but going into the semester having two game options to make the experience even better for my students was well worth it.
The other game’s GitHub repo can be found here, and its documentation website here.