It’s midway through week 2 and we are getting some direction with our project, though at the moment it still feels very open-ended. We’ve had one team meeting so far and right away there was a little bit of disagreement about what the scope of our project should be and even what sort of project we are aiming for. This is a little worrying but should be fine.

Basically, our original idea was to make a project that was a ‘dungeon crawler’ utilizing photos of the real world to generate a dungeon layout for a player to move around. It wouldn’t be true AR in the sense that it is a live feed. However, it would be a project about taking real-world input and producing something from it. The disagreement came in when our third member really wanted to build something procedurally, like a maze structure for the dungeon. This doesn’t quite fit into the original idea of being able to snap a photo and then play on the surface of the photo.

To try and bridge this difference in interests, I proposed that we could have a procedural generation maze-type dungeon that could take photos taken, turn them into rooms, and then linked up multiple rooms together. Sort of how other procedural generated ARPGs might work where they have pre-created rooms that are linked together pseudorandomly.

The alternative to doing this is to divide the project in two right from the start and attempt to develop a game where you could either play in an AR-style layout or have a procedurally generated maze. I don’t like the idea of splitting our 3-person team into two halves being developed independently.

So now we are left with deciding what tools we are going to be using to make this project. We all prefer Python, so that seems like mostly a given. However, we don’t need to stick to just a raw programming language. I proposed we look into a Game Engine. I found two that looked promising (https://te4.org/te4 and https://godotengine.org/) and have spent the last 3 to 4 hours watching tutorials with Godot. It looks promising.

As a backup, I am familiar with PyGame as well, though I’ve already used that a bunch and would like to learn something new.

Back to the tutorials…