Cosmoctopus

Roles

Designer, Programmer

Team

Solo

Time

8 weeks

Tools Used

Unity, Adobe Illustrator

Download on Itch.io

Genre:

2D Top-Down Roguelike

Cosmoctopus was a solo project for a university assignment the requirement of which was to create a game using procedural generation and/or randomization.

Cosmoctopus is a 2D adventure rogue-like game where you play as a space octopus named Squib and roam around outer space trying to collect heart pieces of the Loved One who’s been lost. The environment is procedurally generated and once you die it’s all reset. So, in every playthrough the positions of all the objects are different. The player has to keep track of their H2O level, which acts as their life bar and drains with time, plus simultaneously avoid asteroids and black holes. The key gameplay revolves around skillfully maneuvering around obstacles and trying to live long enough to reach the end goal.

My Contributions

Designed the mechanics
Wrote the story
Used procedural generation and animation for the first time
Created some of the assets using Adobe Illustrator

Researched procedural generation and the various algorithms that come with it in order to find the one that best suited my concept
Programmed the entirety of the game
Used self-organizational methods to reach my goals and maintain scope

Process

For the procedural generation, I used Poisson distribution to generate all the game objects. Each type of object had different weights set to it, so there's a much higher chance of encountering asteroids as opposed to hearts, for example.

Squib's tentacles were created using procedural animation.

The following is the whole plot of Cosmoctopus. What's written in text would be conveyed through imagery only by presenting the player with short comic strips at the beginning and end of the game.