Skeleton Survivors

Skeleton Survivors is the fourth RASA Studios map for the Minecraft Marketplace. In the map, players battle against waves of monsters, growing in strength and number as the game progresses. Within the project, I worked on a number of elements:

• Voice System
  Though we’ve included voice lines in our previous projects, for this we project we pushed ourselves by including voice lines spoken by the players in response to actions that they took, such as defeating a boss or purchasing something in a shop. We ended up adding nearly 300 voice lines in total, with the majority of those being reactions to events in one of 5 different player voices. I implemented a layer of abstraction that allowed events in the game to request that a player start talking, after which a random voice line corresponding to both the event and the player’s current voice (which could be chosen by the player or left to random chance) would be played.
• Achievements
  Similarly to Heist-Meisters, we included a set of achievements in the game, though this time we did not link the achievements to collectables or cosmetics. Some achievements are associated with statistics that are recorded throughout the game, such as the amount of coins that have been picked up or the number of enemies that have been killed, while others are awarded when a single event occurs, such as the door to a particular area being opened. One achievement that I found it challenging at first to implement was “Rag-And-Bone Bang”, which requires a skeleton and a mummy to be killed by the same piece of dynamite.
• Tooling
  Even more so than in some of our previous projects, the development of Skeleton Survivors made use of Python scripts that would automatically generate some of the functions that we needed. I worked a lot with Grant to write the largest of these scripts, which generated functions for the shop based on a large data file specifying every item, its price, and other related data.

Whenever we work on a RASA projects, I will always endeavour to stress just how important the collaboration between different people is to the final results we achieve. As ever, it was a joy to be able to work with with such a wide range of people and see how their unique skillsets were able to contribute to this project.