BoarDash
So, we built a game. A game that looks surprisingly good for a one-week project done by amateurs. It’s called BoarDash. And it’s a medieval DoorDash simulator.
Like probably any kid addicted to video games, I dreamt of making my own for a long time. I never really tried for certain reasons, but I read and watched tons of stuff about it. Through all that came the realisation of how hard and hopeless gamedev is. Successful indies are a survivourship bias; jobs in big studios are hard to get but even if you do you end up miserable. At least that was my impression at the time. Maybe a bit too grim compared to reality, but… I dropped the idea for good.
Building a good game is definitely not easy. The process is far from straightforward. There are too many variables. Luckily, we were short on time, so all we needed was a few minutes of derpy fun with good visuals. And that’s exactly what we made.
The process, I gotta say, was a little stressful at first - mostly because of how allergic I am to teamwork (though that might just be one of my false beliefs) - and how suddenly passionate and argument-prone my teammates became once the idea started to take shape. But by the next day, we were on track, and from that point, things went pretty smoothly.
On Friday, as we were approaching the finish line, I got sick and had to go home early. That was a real shame, since I had just started enjoying the teamwork, and polishing the game and adding final changes was important. Plus, the next day we were supposed to demo our game to our bootcamp peers. I couldn’t make it. I felt even worse on the demo day. Well, it happens. I’m still glad I worked on it. And I’m glad I worked on it with Hubert (github), who made most of the art, player animations, and an absolutely gorgeous map with collision layer; and with Isaac (github), who handled the HUD, start/end/help screens, game logic, and player-villagers interactions including a bunch of funny subtitles for the characters. I, for my part, worked on player-enemy interactions aka combat logic, some villager adjustments and an earlier way simpler version of the map.
Try it yourself: https://boar-dash.vercel.app/
Game’s messy repo: https://github.com/isaacrestrick/BoarDash
Some specifics from my side:
Enemy chase uses Pythagorean theorem for distance calculation, with a vision radius and a minimum approach range; the stop zone is elliptical to fit the isometric look and player sprite shape.
At minimum distance, skeletons attack on a fixed cadence, each hit is –1 heart. We dropped skeleton HP for this build to keep player animations coherent, though I’d rather keep it.
Skeletons are spawned in random positions in three forest areas every 3.5 seconds; after all deliveries every 0.5, with the limit increasing from 12 to 150.
They’re stored in an array; on death we remove them and destroy the sprite. We had a funny bug where sprites vanished but kept following and talking to the player.
Skeleton animations: idle + walk in 4 directions; attack/damage as a brief tint. Each kill adds +1 to the “Skeleton Slayer” title.
⚔️🐗⚔️