Moiz Yousufi, Alex Porter, Jasper Gray, Autumn Kwon
Spring 2024
Overview
The Grinnell College Experience is a top-down 2D Role-Playing Game (RPG) mobile game in the setting of Grinnell College. Users can customize their character, explore Grinnell, and fight epic battles on the campus. This project started from the idea of remembering our college life (like a time capsule) and spreading Grinnell’s joy & spirit to other external/prospective students. The Grinnell College Experience uses 32×32 pixels textures to recreate Grinnell College in a virtualized setting. We wish to utilize this in a fashion to be able to run this game on mobile devices, including iOS and Android. We ended up swapping to the Godot Engine for this game, for convenience in compiling to iOS.
Motivation
This project started from the idea of remembering our college life (like a time capsule) and spreading Grinnell’s joy & spirit to other external/prospective students. We targeted any users who are interested in the Grinnell environment to virtually experience the Grinnell campus and gain useful college information. Grinnell alumni can also recall the 2024 Grinnell in the future even after the Grinnell official website’s virtual tour gets updated.
Product
Overall, the users can experience 6 operational features.
- Intuitive control system for users
- Move around the pixelated Grinnell campus map
- Interact with multiple NPCs
- Play the battles with NPCs
- Save and load the game data
- Play the game on Android devices
The users can move around the pixelated Grinnell campus using arrow keys on the keyboard or the touch screen. By interacting with NPCs, the user can meet virtual people associated with Grinnell and get some fun college information. Users can also enjoy battles with the NPCs. Finally, users can pause or save the game through the side menu and return whenever they want to continue!
To enjoy our game, please visit our GitHub repo and follow the steps to download the game. Basically, you need to install Godot and download our source codes to start the game.
Process
We started our project by choosing the proper development tools and methods. We aimed to release the game on multiple platforms simultaneously upon completion, so we decided to use the Godot engine as we felt it best suited our development goals. Before starting full-scale game development, we brainstormed the desirable game features by classifying them into three scopes and set 5 main features as the MVP of our project. We created the paper prototype to model those selected features and went through several revisions based on feedback from people outside the team. To solidify our software architecture and design, we identified the major software components and their functionality at a conceptual level in our architecture diagram.
Afterward, the entire process was developed according to agile software development. We decided on weekly issues through sprint planning meetings and shared each other’s progress through weekly scrum meetings. After every sprint, we had time to share feedback for the week through a sprint review meeting. All collaboration processes were carried out using Git version control, and we managed all issues with GitHub’s Issue and Project tabs.
It was a great opportunity to learn a new programming language (GDScript) and experience a new game engine (Godot). Beyond the technical skills, we learned how to communicate and share positive feedback.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our Professor, Prof. Leah Perlmutter, for all her support and guidance. Also, our course mentor, Mae Bernacchi, really helped us brainstorm and shape the ideas for our project. We would also like to thank all CSC-324 peers who tested the prototypes, watched our demos, and gave us constructive feedback.
Repository Link
https://github.com/The-Grinnell-College-Experience-Team/GCE-Backend
