Tora's Adventures
Overview
A technical project implementing a 2D tile-based game about my partner (and roommate)'s cat Tora exploring our apartment building. This involved:
Constructing class components with 2000+ lines of code over the course of two months with a partner
Developing a random world generation algorithm that generates rooms randomly and connects all of them with hallways.
Created comprehensive unit tests, saving and loading, and interactive hand-drawn animations.
World generation algorithm
Our game supports random world generation, meaning that for any seed a player types in, a random layout of rooms and hallways must generate. To do this, we coded an algorithm that first generates rooms with random positions and dimensions, then, randomly connected them using horizontal and vertical hallways.
In order to generate a random assortment of rooms, we created the Room class, with a starting coordinate, width, height, and ID. Using a randomly generated position, width, and height, a room would be added to the world if was in bounds of the viewport and not overlapping with existing rooms. We limited the total amount of rooms to control room density and ensure that hallway generation would also work.
Rooms randomly generated without hallways
Once rooms were generated, we needed to produce hallways to connect them. We determined that hallways must satisfy a set of requirements:
Hallways must start and end in a room.
All rooms must be connected to at least one hallway.
Some hallways should intersect and create turns.
Hallways must be one tile wide, meaning that hallways cannot run parallel and adjacent.
To satisfy this set of requirements, we coded an algorithm that iterates through the generated rooms, creating vertical and horizontal hallways until all rooms are connected.
We ran into the most issues with ensuring that all rooms were connected; to solve this problem, we utilized the WeightedQuickUnion data structure, adding each room as a node and using hallways to connect the nodes.
Rooms connected by hallways
World design
My roommate and I took many liberties with designing the world, characters, and other components of the game. We hand designed tiles used for the world including hallways, floors, and walls. We created toys that Tora could "pick up," and poop that Tora should avoid.
We also created a mini game that would trigger once Tora would encounter a box. The goal is to collect all the toys while avoiding the poop. Once all the toys were collected without touching the poop, a hand-drawn animation would appear, congratulating the player.