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It's Pronounced "Dough Lore Us" 

 

Admittedly, this game was and is something of a minor passion project for me. I've always loved the Pokemon franchise, especially the older games, and so when we were told to choose a reference game to base our capstone project on it was an easy choice for me. It was just a matter of persuading the others it was a good idea, which wasn't too difficult for me since my propensity for taking initiative makes me something of a natural leader in situations where decisions need to be made. Granted, one thing this project definitely hammered into me was the need to delegate which was, if anything, my real shortcoming during the course of the capstone project. In my defense, we were explicitly told by the instructors that we didn't have a leader so off my head be it. Even so, there's almost nothing in this project that I didn't either do myself or help someone else work on extensively. This was the project where I realized A: how far I've come, particularly in my coding abilities and B: how far ahead my coding abilities were compared to my fellow graduating Fullsail Game Designers. Not that I mean to disparage their contributions, I couldn't have churned out all that content by myself and volume counts for something in my book, and our artists did a fantastic job in my opinion on the monsters and characters. If anything it's a bit confusing for me, because I'm not sure if being really advanced as a programmer compared to most of the people in my Game Design courses means I'm ahead of the curb in general or if in practice I'm basically just as wet behind the ears as anyone else compared to people with real industry experience. I suspect the latter, probably. 

In any case, in this project I was responsible for every menu including the item menu, monster menu, start screen, the battle screen, and the vendor screen. In fact I gave the monsters stats and the ability to fight each other, I gave the player the ability to catch monsters, the ability to use items including items that teach monsters new abilities and restore their health. I'm responsible for the NPCs having the ability to fight, I created the healing fountains and I gave the player the ability to buy and sell items. I helped on the storage system so much I might as well have created it myself. I'm responsible for the settings menu being able to control screen resolution and raising/lowering the volume of the music. I created the start/load and restart functions (with the help of a tutorial at first but I adapted it heavily to my needs). I also created the maps for the first level and the fourth level which used to be the eighth level and will again one day, I hope. Even though they were a bit buggy I was also proud to have created the illusions on the fourth/eighth level from the false walls to the catching fire illusion to the walking backward illusion (which also inverted the screen color but I think someone accidentally took out my post processing volume by mistake before the above video was recorded) and the false enemies that disappear when you dispel them.

 

I'm responsible for the different types of moves the monsters can use and I at least helped somewhat if not extensively with all the other unique level mechanics by walking my teammates through the code and bug fixing. I also created the elemental type system with all the advantages and disadvantages as well as same type attack bonus and the level up process. It's also not apparent from the video above because it's currently scrapped for lack of monster variety after the artists upgraded us to better looking monsters but I also created a system for monster evolutions as well. At the end of the day I can't complain about doing most of the work myself because I'd like to think it looks better for me on my resume anyway, and my team was certainly happy that I "carried them" through to graduation. The only real downside at the end of the day is that it also means that basically all the bugs are my fault, including the game breaking ones. Woe is me, que sirah sirah.