The Afterworld Chronicle

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High Concept

A 2D procedurally generated action platformer, where the player must explore the universe to find powerful weapons and rescue human survivors.

Videos

Description

In The Afterworld Chronicle, players unlock a special teleporter that allows them to travel through chunks of destroyed planets, called “Afterworlds”. To explore the galaxy, players must input the sector of the afterworld in the form of a three letter key. This will randomly generate an environment and populate it with random loot and enemies. The player can later return to this afterworld by inputting the same key. The idea behind this concept is to bring back the old-school feel of sharing codes with friends. So if you found a cool weapon or an environment that you found challenging, you can tell the code to use to a friend and they can explore the same level you did from their game. The objective is to find better gear to overcome later obstacles, while also rescuing humans to advance in the story. Will you be able to uncover the mysteries of this distant future?

Features

  • Action-packed single player campaign that will test your skills
  • Defeat enemies with 30+ unique weapons
  • Customize your character with 60+ costumes
  • Explore millions of procedurally generated environments
  • Travel through the galaxy in search for human survivors
  • Engage in challenging Boss battles
History

During our second semester at DigiPen, we are required to build a game using our own engine, built from scratch in C. We are only allowed to use the “Alpha Engine”, which is basically a wrapper around OpenGL, but we are not allowed to use any other external libraries. This proved to be a very challenging learning experience, but very satisfying once we managed to ship our game. Our lead designer, Zack, already had an idea of how to get procedural generation for a platformer game, so we decided to work around that mechanic and add a story element as well as cool weapons and fun action gameplay. In only 4 weeks, we managed to get our prototype up and running, with our platforming code done, a few weapons and the level generation working. After this point, we focused on adding content. We managed to get 32 unique weapons into the game as well as 64 fully animated costumes. Seeing as DigiPen is a very demanding school, most of the artists we had approached to do art for us were swamped with schoolwork, so we decided to make all the art and animations ourselves. Everything you see in this game is “Programmer Art”. At the end of the semester, we got voted the best game of our section and we got Second Place for Best Freshman Game at the DigiPen Game Awards.

My contributions to the game were:

  • Produced a team of 3 members
  • Implemented custom Keyboard and Xbox Controller input
  • Programmed gameplay mechanics, enemies and bosses
  • Designed some of the few custom-made levels in the game
  • Created the animations for all 64 costumes and all 16 human survivor sprites as well as some tilesets and miscellaneous art
  • Contributed to the design of the game
Screenshots

Download all screenshots as .zip (408KB)

GIFs

Logo & Icon

Afterworld_Logo

Afterworld_Icon

Credits

Zachary Bell
Lead Designer
Programmer
Sprite Artist
Animator
Alejandro Hitti
Producer
Product Manager
Programmer
Designer
Sprite Artist
Animator
Hiago Desena
Technical Director
Programmer
Tools Developer
Dylan Hanwright
Composer
SFX
Download

Currently I am in the process of getting The Afterworld Chronicle into the DigiPen Game Gallery. I will post the link as soon as it is uploaded.

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