Verbum

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  Example Fabric provided in potential maps (albeit an unused feature besides for customization)

INSPIRATION:

The main inspiration for this was a combination of an RTS game, similar to the games proposed in the Battlecode programming competition, as well as a bit of a roguelike flair(although not as much as I imagined prior), as I had something resembling the Binding of Isaac game series in mind when conceptualizing.

Functionally, it is a game based on the addage, as mentioned prior, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". You get letters which spawn on the screen and add them a stack which the player has(the max capacity of which is set to 10)

METHODOLOGY: It is built using Processing 3 using Java (with some aid from the external libraries provided from Processing's open source community)

VARIOUS CHALLENGES:

Being a one person team does not help, considering the project itself was upwards of ~900 lines of code as well as having to test and come up with the actual idea. For instance, the basis of the game's "fun"-ness is the variety of attacks you can do based on the dictionary provided in the project file. However, for the sake of demo-ing, I had to fix it to four different abilities: FIRE, ICE, SHIELD, SPEAKER. (Fire and Ice are pretty self-explanatory, same with shield(increases durability to damage), but Speaker was a buff on strength, a play on the focus of the game on words).

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

The most promising accomplishment from this is the modeling of the map for one of the underdeveloped minigames(a minigame which I plan to develop further), since it allows for dynamic movement of the graph and changing of the map with relatively low cost to the computer, utilizing a Proportional-Integral-Derivative controller in order to create a fluid movement from point A to point B.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED: The main thing I have learned from this is that, while Processing does seem to work for a 2D RTS game like this, it would be worth my time to give Unity a try, since it has many more tools built in for game design and development, which would allow me to speed the development of the game up.

THE FUTURE OF VERBUM:

I will attempt to build a bot system for it which will play an easy, medium, or difficult play-style, as well as build in more words than the ones I was able to build into it in the short duration that the hackathon has been active. Also, I plan on fully building in the minigame on the undirected graph(I will provide a picture of certain trial maps below; the idea is that players will start on different nodes and collect letters which appear on certain nodes, and spell out words for special attacks as well as perform various passive attacks). Also, perhaps I could develop some themed sprites for the characters(as it is now, it was just colored circles, I am not very adept in sprite design).

Built With

• gaming
• java
• processing