Hochschule Augsburg
Game Development

Lusaki – Ein Action-Adventur-Game

The Lusaki project was created to identify challenges and collect methods that can be used to develop an action-adventure video game with modern 2D graphics. It is shown that strategies for planning and designing systems and concepts carefully help in modeling and discussing ideas and allow fast and robust development.

The main characters in the game are Lusaki in her adult and child form, the Oneiroi, the Collector and the Muma enemies. There are no clearly "good" or "evil" characters so no colors where used to visually distinguish affinity. The dream world stage presented in this work is very colorful but most of the areas visited in the game will be a tad darker and more surreal. The main characters also feature mostly dark colors but colorful smaller enemies and side characters exists as well to cover the somewhat depressing background story with a seemingly happy and easygoing world.

Lusaki' s world is a library, serving mainly as hub that connects the entry points of the different dreams. The library is located outside the dream world and can be navigated by the adult version of Lusaki. It contains a lot of books and a few of them can be read to let her fall asleep while reading to enter a stage in the dream world. This design embeds the level selection into the story and there is no need for the player to learn an additional selection screen or a game mechanic that would only be used for this single purpose.

Great emphasis was placed on a well designed and maintainable system architecture. To achieve this the first task was to identify the components of the engine and define clear boundaries. An UML (unified modeling language) package diagram was created to design and show the structure and connection of the systems parts. Each package was then implemented as a "package" in the sense of the Java language.