Sunday Evening Imaginarium (C# + XNA 4.0)


The game was developed in C# using XNA 4.0 framework. The game was merely meant as a demo which we presented to a small panel of people.
 
Game Design Documentation Available Here

Sunday Evening Imaginarium is a two player game with the aim being to get people who aren’t gamers interested in games. The aim is to protect the idol in the centre from the attacking goblins and keep the bar up so you don’t fail; however there is a twist which I’ll go into in a second. 

Player one is taking on the role of the experienced gamer, his role is to collect wood and stone which then gets turned into planks and metal. These resources are then used to upgrade the second player’s damage or make trap’s, the planks can also be used to repair the idol. The second player has to stop the goblins from coming – he has the use of a sword, traps and arrows to aid him. The idea behind this was to simplify the genre of an RTS and reduce its mechanics to the simplest form (resource collection and attacks).

Now for the twist, on the surface you are just a knight and a villager protecting an idol from goblins, trying to keep the health up. However you are actually two brothers on a Sunday evening trying to have as much fun as possible; I’m not the best at art so it can be kind of hard to see. What’s in the centre is actually a teddy bear on a pile of books, when the “goblins” attack, you get bored (like kids do when they’re not doing well) and lose motivation, which is what the health bar actually is. Once you lose a certain amount of motivation, your imagination that has built the world around begins to fail, and you start to see things for what they really are. So as you lose motivation; the grass turns back to carpet, the saw mill turns back to your wardrobe etc.

A stat and achievement system is also available, which I put in place to keep the game going throughout playthroughs. 

As I stated at the start – this title was only built as a demo to showcase the mechanics implemented. There was no further task to complete additional features, and I did not have time to complete them due to other tasks being set and needing my time devoted to them. I also had plans to have different skins, that could act as different imaginary place. For example the pair could play as astronauts protecting a satellite from aliens, the only changes needed would be a different texture set. 

If you would like to view more images of the game, they are availablehere

If you would like to download a standalone version of thegame it is available here (requires two Xbox 360 controllers) | 10.5 MB

The source code is available here | 48.7 MB

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