Retro-introducing: Shadow Quest

Shadow Quest iconA couple of years ago, I took a subject at uni called Object-Oriented Software Development (433-294). Although I had already introduced myself to OOP, this was the best subject I’d ever taken, because the OOP paradigm was my favourite thing about programming, and it’s always worthwhile learning important things formally. On top of this, we had a fantastic lecturer (Shanika Karunasekera) with a bold plan to inject some life into the otherwise tiresome semester project – instead of building a generic banking application or similar, we would be writing a game.

This was, of course, right up my alley, and ultimately the result was Shadow Quest. You can read more about it on the project page, but essentially we were given a set of specific requirements to build an RPG using the Slick game library, and that would be our assessment (though various stages of planning and development). Brilliant. Everyone loved it.

Of course some students found it less challenging than others, and for them the challenge was set to create the best game extension by the end of the semester. So long as the basic requirements were fulfilled, we could add anything we wanted, and the author of the best game would win a book voucher.

I leapt at this opportunity, and set about implementing a bunch of features from Diablo II, my favourite RPG (despite it being a hack’n'slash). I added player experience, levelling, stats, inventory and equipment, magic items, random item drops, gold drops, buying potions, and the thing I was most proud of was my randomly generated dungeon: five levels of caves procedurally generated by a cellular automaton. It took a lot of work, but worked a treat, and I felt like I was in with a chance for best game.

Unfortunately, come judgement day, there was some very impressive competition, including one game which blew all the competition away in terms of features and polish. A giant map, animations, weather, visual effects, magic spells, archery, horse-riding, a town with indoors in the buildings, a bunch of NPCs, and so on. It was the deserving winner, but I still reckon it was the work of more than one person.

Anyway, I dug out the code for my version of Shadow Quest the other day, and decided to post it up here for posterity, with a few tweaks for efficiency. Again, you can check out the project page, the source code on Bitbucket (don’t judge me, it’s old!), or more importantly play it in your browser or download the Web Start. Enjoy!