Escape the dungeon is a game where you, the player is escaping from a dungeon where a bomb is about to explode. You have navigate the dungeon and make it to the exit, making sure to avoid all the rats that are out to poison any living being. There are rat-holes in which many rats hide. The longer you stay in the dungeon, the more they start to leave their homes to come out and poison you. The only way to avoid the rats in jump over them when they run towards you! You have 3 chances to try and get out, else you lose.

I interpreted the theme very literally and my game is modelled accordingly. The player is placed in a dungeon where a bomb is about to explode. The impending explosion was to give the player a reason to escape – I felt that the game wouldn’t portray the theme of escaping without something to escape from. I also wanted to provide a challenge in escaping, and hence I added the rats. I think that the rats also fit the general theme of the dungeon and have a part to play in this space that I have created for the game.

The implementation of the game came out as a 2D platformer style game. The player would have the ability to jump and move left and right. Additionally, I added ladders into the platform which the player could climb. I felt that this gave a better sense of movement inside a dungeon that jumping on ledges. It also allowed me to widen out the ledges and make a better play area. The rats were designed to move aimlessly until they interacted with the player. The rats had a one in five chance of falling down a ledge, and a four in five chance of staying on the ledge itself. I arrived at this number after several tries of my own. I decided to have 3 rat-holes from which rats would appear since I thought that this would be the ideal number. I also added a check to make sure that only 25 rats exist in the dungeon at any given point. If not, the dungeon would be filled with too many rats and the player wouldn’t be able to move properly.

In terms of the gameplay, I was happy that most users were comfortable with the controls as well the concept of the game. However, I did feel that I might have made the game a bit too hard. One less rathole might have made the game easier to play and maybe a little more fun. While I was playing the game myself, I got used to it and didn’t realise that it’d be hard for someone who hasn’t played before. I guess that one less rat-hole might have been the perfect difficulty level for the game.

I must also mention the many problems I faced with p5. As I’ve said before, the addSpeed function seemed to give many problems and would make the collisions a bit iffy. Since I wasn’t able to figure out the reason for these problems in time, I switched to using pygame. In terms of the architecture of the framework it is mostly very similar to p5play – it has a setup and a update loop for displaying things frame by frame. It also provides collision detection and some other neat features. Python is also very comfortable for me to work with, and it’s object oriented!

Lastly – regarding the game as being an artifact. I think this game has a large number of possible interactions – between the various game objects. Each interaction is unique and adds a different aspect to the entire mechanics of the game. For example, the rats falling off the ledges forces the player to be wary of rats on the ledge above. There is a definite logic in the game and is obeyed by all the different entities of the game itself. I think of this therefore as a man-made ‘logical’ artifact. The game also deals with a setting of a dungeon (which would be alot more clear with well-defined images). It plays into the common conceptions of how a dungeon is and what lives inside a dungeon. It could be considered a cultural artifact in that sense.

LINK to files

To be able to play the game, one must have python installed on their computer. Next, using pip one must install pygame. To run the game, simply type “` python3 newMain.py “` in the directory of the file in the command prompt/terminal window. If there is difficulty in being able to play the game, let me know and I’m happy to help!