Downtown Bazooka
Rocket-Jumping 3rd-Person Shooter and Platformer
Armed with only a bazooka and the will to survive, you fight your way past countless enemies to discover the waypoints that lead you to the final boss. Defeat him and the world is yours!
The Game
Downtown Bazooka is a rocket-jumping third-person action & exploration platformer written in C++ using SFML and OpenGL for my sophomore year Video Game Development Club project. The objective is to reach all of the waypoints and then defeat the final boss.
The idea of the game actually came from just the name, which one of the officers in the club had created by using a random game name generator. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Tron and Mad Max, we created a vast 3D world in which players could explore infinitely.
The Team
The Lessons
Downtown Bazooka presented me with a unique opportunity that I have yet to deal with again: the ability to work with a custom C++ game engine (written by John), and write code using that engine.
For programming, the most valuable thing I learned was being able to read and understand other people's code. It was a skill that I had not really had the chance to use until this project, as being able to read the engine code and understand what parts of it I needed to use was an important part of being able to contribute to this project.
Additionally, I had a lot of fun designing and programming the final boss battle. I also implemented some other things, such as the health bar, the items, etc., which would have only taken a few seconds in Unity, but ended up taking much longer in this project due to having to learn how the engine works.