Hack n' Dash

We chose to pursue the connection track in a way that was very real to both of us - co-op games. Throughout COVID, one way we both continued to feel connected to our friends and the rest of the world was through simple yet engagind games, somtimes against one another, but more often as a team. These co-op games are a fun, lighthearted way to sit down with your friends, share a keyboard, yell at one another for dying, and work your way through the game. So much of our lives have been built around these simple vessels for connection, and we wanted to replicate that and keep it alive for ourselves and others.

Hack N' Dash is a side-scrolling platformer. It has a home screen, scrolling level, and end screen. The main characters, Sheepuff and Angelfin, travel together accross the UW campus to earn the ultimate prize - a DubCoin. Along side various tile skins, the game features sliding boxes, heavy boxes that require both players to push, some very powerful fans, and a few spikes.

We split the work into two main components - coding and assets. Tomas had much more coding experience than I so he took on the Unity work. While he set up physics and an environment, I learned how to to use Piskel and created all of our sprites and animations. We had all of our efforts combined by very early Sunday morning and did some quick play testing and level design much later Sunday morning.

A big challenge was collisions. In an effort to make the environment more visually interseting, I added lots of annoying borders to terrain. Tomas then informed me of the pain it would be to get all of these meshes fitting properly. Whoops. We resolved this by simplifying slopes to ramps. There are a few bugs in the physics, which led to a new feature, wall climbing. We also had some scaling issues with pixels, but decided it was a design choice.

I personally am very proud of making anything. I've never coded before and haven't used any pixel art programs etiher. Tomas was able to put together a fun, functioning game in 24 hours, working through physics bugs and no wifi. I also would like to thank Tomas for showing me so much of Visual Studio, Unity, and C#. I now feel like I have my footing in the coding world, which I think is the whole point of DubHacks. Together we wanted to make a simple, fun game, hang out, and get free stuff. By these criteria, we suceeded.