Endgame
Anastasia Giljum
Department of Computer Science, University of Wyoming
Advised by Dr. Mike Borowczak
May 2020
1 Abstract
Endgame is a 2D role-playing game about a university senior who is worried
about graduating and unsure about life after education. The students fear
manifests itself in the form of a dream world in which the student must venture
through four different zones (representative of years at university), learning new
skills and making new friends along the way. After defeated the final bosses in
each of the four zones, the student must finally face Grad, the living embodiment
of the student’s fear of graduation and what comes next. The game is meant to
be relatable to students who are worried about what will happen after leaving
the education system and be a fun way of recognizing that everything will be
okay. The game is made using Unity engine, with open-source art, music, and
sound assets. Games are a great way for creators to share what they have made
and allow others to build and expand into something greater. Endgame makes
use of the creations of others, and hopefully inspires others to do the same.
1
2 Introduction
Many people use video games as a means of escaping the tedium of everyday life.
Video games provide an escape, sometimes to a fantasy or science fiction world,
where players can forget about their usual troubles and focus instead on saving
the world. This project was meant to be a way to relate to graduating seniors,
recognizing the stress and concerns that they face, while also portraying those
issues in a more fantastical light. Seniors often seem to struggle with the idea of
moving past the ”traditional education” stage in their lives and instead having
to focus on work and starting to build the rest of their lives. By embracing those
fears and allowing players to defeat their anxieties with a sword and magic, this
project is meant to help seniors better mentally prepare themselves for the next
big step in life.
3 Method
The game is a 2D Zelda-like RPG (role-playing game) built using the Unity 2D
engine, with all code being written in C# using Visual Studio. All the sprites,
sounds, music, and other assets are open-sourced components. The project was
broken up into five major tasks: story, character, world, combat, and inventory.
Story includes the main plot, side quests, dialogue, and the questing system.
Character includes character creation, customization (including changing armor
and weapons), and state (including health, mana, attributes, etc.). World con-
sists of world creation, NPCs, dungeons, and buildings. Combat includes enemy
AI and two types of combat systems (action combat and turn-based battles).
Inventory consists of all items in the game and the inventory system. Each of
these main tasks was split up between the project’s group members, and were
mostly completed concurrently, with the focus being on creating functionality
before adding additional features. The group will meet up in-person weekly
outside of class to check in on progress and distribute the next steps. After all
functionality was added, the separate components would be used together to
2
build four distinct zones that would make up the complete game.
4 Results
The final game ended up not having all four zones, but the project did have all
functionality built, along with a tutorial and the first zone. The functionality
took much longer than expected, because the group failed to take into account
how much time it would take to work out general bugs as well as getting the
individual components to work well together. Also, the group was unable to
work as closely or hold other members as accountable for work as a result of
COVID-19 and the effects that it had on the in-person meetings and class time.
This was especially detrimental to the project because it was around the same
time that we started to piece the components that different group members
had completed together, so it was harder to communicate with each other and
understand how the pieces should work together. The project was also simplified
to make sure that there was a playable game at the end. For example, along
with having fewer zones, we removed the buying/selling system, dialogue trees,
character classes, and procedural world and quest generation to complete this
iteration of the game.
5 Future Work
In the future, we hope to have the game in a state that is closer to what was
originally imagined. We hope to finish the rest of the zones, as well as add
features such as a barter system, more in-depth dialogue with player choices
that affect the world, and procedural generation for the world and quests to
have more content and add replayability. The group has already agreed to
continue communicating with each other and continue working on the project
to create an actual fun finished game.
3
6 Conclusion
This project was great experience for the group members, who learned much
about game design, planning, and working as a team on a (comparatively to
previous projects) large project. We have learned that there is much more that
goes into game development than originally planned, and ideas have to be open
to change in order to get anything done in such a small time-frame, especially
when the world presents situations that are out of your control. We hope that
this game, even in its semi-unfinished state, will be relatable to graduating
seniors, and allow them to see that they are not alone in their fears, and make
it easier for them to move on from what they have known to the next stages in
their lives.
4