RuneCaster
RuneCaster started as a game project I developed at University based on an assignment I was given to build a mobile game using the Java library LibGDX. Mobile games weren’t something I personally played so it was a learning process for me and required me to look into and test other popular games on the platform. I wanted to make use a strength of mobile devices, the touch screen, so the main mechanic was to cast spells by drawing matching runes once prompted on the screen. Otherwise, it was a normal arena survival game with a fantasy setting, in which you had to survive for as long as you could to get a better score. The original idea was for the player to free hand draw the runes however this was hard to implement with our time constraints and as such for the assignment rune drawing was instead achieved by connected nodes. I was also lucky enough to have a pixel artist friend do the artwork for me.
The game as an assignment was well received and with my brother I decided to continue development as a hobby. We first ported the game to the Unity Engine, which thanks to the Unity store we found an asset which let us have spell casting with free hand drawing like how we original envisioned it. We were also able to get another friend onboard, Edward Hund, who at the time was wanting to get into making music for games and of writing this now works full time doing so.
We presented the game at some conventions, being lucky enough to win a position to present at AVCON’s (One of Adelaide, Australia’s biggest conventions) indie corner in 2016. This gave us plenty of feedback and it was a great experience to see other people playing our games. My favourite thing to notice was how quicky children picked up how to play the game in comparison to adults.
Unfortunately in the next year we all became very busy, with me moving to Japan and starting work on Heroes Trials, and the other team members busy with their respective jobs. Development of the project eventually came to an end.
A Learning Process
Although the project was never finished I still got to experience presenting a project of my own at a convention for the first time, working with people from different backgrounds and fields and coordinating to work around our schedules and skillsets, and learned a lot about using Java, the Unity engine, and coding in C#. My biggest takeaway was to let others implement their own ideas. As I was the one to initially think of the project and it’s mechanics, I wasn’t very receptive to others inputs as I thought that they may deviate away from what I had envisioned. However, in hindsight, I think I just wanted the game to be mine and I regret not letting others on the team implement more of their own ideas.
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