Death's Knocking

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Death's Knocking is the spawn of the Ludem Dare28 Game Jam. I worked on this project alongside of Michael Gooch, and Owen Lacava.

The game is a survival game, set in an old mansion inhabited by the Reaper. The objective is to last as long as you can (as seen with the in game timer), before the Reaper gets to you. The Reaper will roam the large mansion in your direction, Barricading down doors as he passes through. The player can break the barricades by hitting it long enough, but it slows the Player down. There is only a limited light source, and you can hear laughter and increased music intensity as he approaches nearer.

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My Role:

I was the AI programmer, and was responsible for programming the Reaper. This was my first go at programming pathfinding on a 2D plane with no "nodes". I ended up creating my own nodes throughout the map that the Reaper would travel to, by calculating a backwards path from the player, to find the shortest route. This route gets updated each time the player moves into another room.

 

One of the challenges was figuring out how I wanted this algorithm to work, and how the Reaper should act, and figuring out a proper movespeed for him. Obviously, the player should be able to run away from the Reaper, but he should catch up to him eventually. So instead of slowing down the Reaper, he's sped up rather, but he takes breaks between rooms to lock them down.

Overall, it was a very fun and exciting Game Jam, I can't remember the theme of the Jam, but I remember our game not resembling it very well, interestingly enough. Special thanks to the game programmer Michael Gooch, and Owen Lacava for the art and great sound.

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You can download the game below:

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