Cast Forward is a roguelike, wizard game where the player has to escape through a portal. Over the course of three and a half months, I developed the game on my own following Agile practices such as Kanban. As I worked on it, I received regular feedback and user stories that influenced the design. It boasts procedural generation powered by multiple algorithms and shape grammars. I designed the gameplay to emphasize movement, so that players can quickly make their escape and explore the level. I created most of the assets using software such as: Unity, Maya, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Substance Painter. I also used a few third-party assets to expedite the process.
Development for this game started with a hexagonal, grid-based level generation system. I chose to use hexagons knowing that they would enable the player to move more freely than with squares. The level generator starts by generating a grid and selecting different points to connect. Those points are fed into a triangulation algorithm, where it finds the minimum spanning tree of those points. With that tree, the generator uses A* to generate paths between the selected points. Finally every point within the network is assigned a room tile. The furthest two points being the start and end of the level.
The process is:
It was essential for me to get movement right for this game. I began by creating a test scene where I could build a first-person player controller following Shigeru Miyamoto’s “miniature garden” design philosophy. As I created the player’s state machine, I regularly tested each interaction the player might have.