Introduction

Students in their second year of the Real Time Interactive Simulation (RTIS) program at DigiPen Institute of Technology are required to design and implement a 2D scrolling game engine over the course of two semesters. Fortunately, this project is not left to each individual to complete by themselves – teams are formed among students, usually consisting of four or fewer members but never more than five. Each member of the team wears a particular ‘hat’ for the life of the project and assumes all responsibilities for their respective position. The roles include Producer, Designer, Technical Director, Product Manager, and occasionally a Tester, if there are five people on the team.

For my Sophomore year, I was fortunate enough to work as the Designer with four other very talented, hard-working individuals on Team Infinite Sound. The roles were assigned as follows:

Joseph Tkach – Producer
Zach Aikman – Designer
Paul Marden – Technical Director
Steve Bjore – Product Manager
Andy Plummer – Tester

Since the middle of our first year at DigiPen, we had been tossing around various ideas for a second year project. We all belong to that strange group of individuals who believe that the 16-bit era was the “Golden Age” of the video game industry. Consequently, we wanted to capture that timeless feeling of playing an old Super Nintendo game as best we could. The graphics, controls and gameplay were all designed with this concept in mind. In the end, we opted to create an action/adventure game, similar in style to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The trick for us was to keep our game as original as possible while still capturing all of the essential elements that made the Zelda games so much fun to play.

In the end, the high concept for our game ended up looking something like this:
A 2D, top-down action/adventure game set in a steampunk/magic hybrid world, with an emphasis on puzzle-solving and dungeon-crawling elements.

The basic premise of our core gameplay revolved around the idea that as the player progressed through various rooms in each dungeon, he/she would find a new item to help them solve puzzles that showed up later in the dungeon, or in another dungeon altogether. These items included a sword, a gun, a magnet, rockets, boots and a lightning spell. The puzzle widgets included objects such as a spring, generator, conveyor belt, stone blocks, oscillating targets and several other various items.
Each widget would respond differently to items the player obtained. For example, the generator would turn on or off whenever it was targeted by the lightning spell. By combining these puzzle widgets, we could construct elaborate puzzles out of relatively simple pieces.