Castaway: Wizard on a Raft

Make Game Gooder Inc. (Team #28)

Dana Conley, Joshua Dahl, Misha Desear, and Jared White

Instructors: Dr. Dave Feil-Seifer and Devrin Lee

External Advisors: Dr. Frederick C. Harris, Jr and Erik Marsh (University of Nevada, Reno)

Project Description

Castaway is a single-player roguelike deck-building card game. You begin the game as a wizard on a rudimentary raft and your goal is to survive as long as possible while having to overcome progressively more difficult obstacles the sea puts in your path. Over time you will come across other castaway companions who can be recruited to your crew, granting you more cards in your deck. Some have special abilities associated with a crew member’s role. Additionally, after defeating various monstrosities of the sea you will be able to choose what to do with the body. Some of it may be transformed into materials to improve your ship with, while the rest will need to be saved for creating rations in order to improve crew morale. Between battles, you can interact with your crew and eventually create certain “buildings” to provide them with different bonuses. If the player dies, some of their progress is preserved as they may later encounter leveled-up crew members from previous runs.

The main goal of this project is to create a game that is easy to pick up and accessible to those unfamiliar with card games, yet thematically and mechanically interesting enough to create replayability. Our objectives are to create a collection of cards that can be used to construct various decks, implement smooth turn-based combat with engaging enemies, design a simple resource management system as well as a variety of encounters outside of battles such as shops and random events, and to produce assets with a cohesive and memorable aesthetic. 

Problem Domain Book

Smith, Matt, et al. Unity 2021 Cookbook: Over 140 Recipes to Take Your Unity Game Development Skills to the next Level, 4th Edition. Packt Publishing, Limited, 2021.

The above is a book that runs through from the simplest aspects (displaying a “Hello World” of developing with Unity to more complicated aspects, such as utilizing Unity’s Cinemachine for scenes. This book gets into more specific breakdowns of potential Unity applications we will need to enhance and develop our game. The provided examples can also ensure we have a clearer understanding of implementation versus general instructions you may find in a user manual. 

My girlfriend is a Unity cookbook with recipes to make game gooder?!

Reference Articles

Cerny, Vojtech, and Filip Dechterenko. "Rogue-like games as a playground for artificial intelligence–evolutionary approach." International Conference on Entertainment Computing. Springer, Cham, 2015. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-24589-8_20

This article details the use of artificial intelligence in the roguelike title Desktop Dungeons, exploring possible applications using its API. Evolutionary algorithms were used to fine-tune a simple greedy AI, taking into account factors like total gained XP and remaining HP using a fitness function. Genetic operators were also utilized by introducing a mutator that made some individual enemies avoid attacking monsters below a certain level and refrain from consuming health potions.  

Saridakis, Anastasios. "Design and implementation of turn-based card game in Unity." (2021). http://166.62.7.99/conferences/AEASR/MEIMIE%202019/MEIMIE64.pdf

This article details the design elements of the role-playing game Dice of Destiny, going over battle rules, card content, card rules, code design, and more. Each element is presented in detail; for example, the code design section discusses the characteristics and utilization of coroutines and interrupt instructions.

Wei, Haoxuan. "Analysis on the Optimal Moves Prediction for Hearthstone." 2022 8th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2022). Atlantis Press, 2022. https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/ichssr-22/125974786

This article provides an analysis on predicting optimal moves in the deck-building game Hearthstone using the application HSTracker. HSTracker is an automatic deck tracker and manager that provides information such as move prediction, the opponent’s deck composition, which hero has the highest winning rate, and more. By scanning in a document containing all card information, HSTracker is able to provide the player with optimal moves to make.

Project Related Website

Unity User Manual 2022.1 https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.2/Documentation/Manual/index.html

This user manual contains all of the necessary information needed to successfully create a game using the Unity engine. The manual includes sections like “Working in Unity,” “Unity 2D,” “Audio,” and other topics that will be vital to the creation of this project. As this is the official user manual, we can find more information on a large scale within one resource.