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 a used for the course. The game is an intentionally simple RPG (role-playing game) engine that can be built upon. The game engine was designed 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 worked on this game throughout August in 2022 to prepare it to be used for the SER225 course I am teaching in the Fall 2022 semester.
The “other” game
This game wasn’t the first I created for the SER225 course. Originally, I created a platformer game, which was used for several iterations of the course starting in the Fall 2020 semester, back before I started teaching here at Quinnipiac. I became the instructor of SER225 for the Fall 2022 semester, so I decided to give the original platformer game some much needed TLC. I then impulsively for some reason wanted to see if I could transform the platformer game into an RPG game while changing as little as possible.
Surprisingly, things started working out, and then I got super into it. This game is the final result. 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.