Shade

Shade is a mobile top-down action game that I created along with three other students at Cornell University in the spring of 2016 as a semester-long project for the class Advanced Topics in Game Design. The game was showcased at the 2016 Game Design Initiative at Cornell festival.

I was the programming lead of the team. Besides my programming tasks, I was responsible for designing the game's software architecture, identifying and scheduling outstanding tasks, and dividing work among the three-person programming team. In terms of coding, I wrote base classes, worked on the level editor, implemented level serialization and de-serialization, and handled object management, among many other tasks. In addition, I was the team's AI programmer; I devised a linked list solution for action sequences for non-playable characters, allowing the sequences to be easily manipulated through our level editor.

The game was built using the Cocos2D-X game engine in C++, which allowed us to develop both for iOS and Android. In line with this, we used both Xcode and Visual Studio to develop the game, which meant we were using two different compilers (Visual C++ and Clang). As all of the programmers in the team were developing a sizable project in C++ for the first time, the development process proved to be a good exercise in C++ coding practices. Some of our learning moments came from interesting discrepancies in the two compilers, mostly related to how the compilers handle templates.

GAMEPLAY

In the game, the player controls a gray figure in a world of cartoonish monsters. The figure is in fact a shadow separated from its host monster, and the player's aim is to reach the host located at the end of each level. As a shadow without a host, too much exposure kills it, whether it is due to sunlight or due to being seen by other monsters around it.