The Parchment Dragon

"The Parchment Dragon" is the first game I've made. I led a group of ~7 freshmen and we used the Microsoft XNA 3.1 framework to develop a vertically-scrolling shooter. We didn't want it to be a space shooter though so we chose a fantasy theme and went with a parchment-like art style (thus the name). We worked on it in our free time during the fall 2010 semester and plan to continue developing it over the spring semester.

The game features high-quality animations (30 fps) and detailed backgrounds. Instead of power ups found in most games in this genre, we decided to implement a power meter, called the hunger gauge. When you defeat enemies, they sometimes drop food. Eating this boosts power temporarily and adds a score multiplier.

I worked on getting the engine and game logic running, meaning that I adapted the animation code, wrote how levels are written, displayed and updated, programmed the UI elements such as the health bar, score and lives display and the food gauge, and implemented player control. To manage the game state, we adapted some code given as a demo from Microsoft. In retrospect, I think that made it both more difficult to work with and easier to work with at times. Given our team's relative lack of C# experience when starting the project, many parts of the system are not written as cleanly as they could be. At some point I'll come back and clean up the tangled mess of code that we left in the project.

Source code available upon request.

Change Log

1.1 (April 10, 2011)
-Completed stage 1.
-Rebalanced stage. Bosses now fire less frequently.
-Player movement not as fast.
-Added health gauge for bosses.
-Game launches in fullscreen now.
-Added controller support.

1.0 (Dec. 2010)
-First release.
-Able to move, shoot, defeat enemies up to mini-boss.
-Completed half of stage 1.

Downloads

The current builds are hosted on the Game Creation Society website. Visit their site to download the game.