Kretaceous Kombat - 21/11/19

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Kretaceous Kombat was the first major game I made at university, with a small team of other people. It was made to fit a number of requirements we were given, which were:

We initially had several ideas, such as being an oil tycoon who would have to barter with dinosaurs in order to secure a good deal on their oil, or some kind of random game where you played a small dinosaur who escaped from his enclosure at night that was located somewhere in Nevada, broke into the local Tesco and messed up the shop (At the time, Untitled Goose Game was getting quite big).

In the end, we decided on a game similar to Slay the Spire, a card based fighting game, where you would fight through a tournament of dinosaurs, using different cards to attack, block and grab in a rock-paper-scissors style. The arena was based in a desert, and your score was determined by how much money you had at the end of the game, however buying more cards to attack with cost more money. We wanted to have some features carry over from our other ideas, such as cabbages as health pickups, and winning a giant golden penguin at the end, but sadly that never came to fruition.

Image of Slay the Spire

We had a decent prototype of the game pretty quickly, and after that we just had to iterate on it repeatedly, doing things like adding pictures of cards, adding sound effects and music, and adding in more cards and enemies. By the end of development, we had 3 different bosses (Vinnie the Velocirapper, The Block Ness Monster and Rex Mysterio), and tens of cards.

Image of the game

There were a couple of bugs that made it into the final release. The cards sometimes had an issue where they would display at twice the size they were meant to. I never worked out why that happened, even slightly, though I have an inkling that it was an issue with the size of the card assets when imported. We never implemented a proper ending, so as soon as you beat the third boss, the game will probably crash while trying to find the next boss to fight.

Overall, I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I made some failings as a programmer, and our team cohesion wasn't the best, however we still made a potentially viable product, that could have been developed further into a possible success story.

Gameplay video:
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