Ripley’s Treasure is a game that I helped to develop in a group for coursework for my module Commercial Games Development Process. Our task for this project was to plan and create a game that is linked to the city of Hull, because we’re the UK City of Culture 2017. We decided that we wanted to make a game oriented more towards children, we settled on the 8-12 age range, and we decided it would be a point and click adventure around the city.

This module is about the business behind development, and so a lot of work was done into planning, timesheets were maintained, there was always a UML diagram to visualise our program’s structure. Theoretically this game would be targetted towards schools rather than individual users.

I was the sole programmer in this project. I ported my old XNA library over to Monogame and made some updates to it, and set that up to be used as the framework for the game. I designed and implemented the UI, and implemented puzzles and features that the team requested. One of the larger challenges of this project was creating the book. There is a book in the game which tells a narrative of the main character. It takes text from an XML file, and then splits it over multiple pages. It then angles the text so that it is drawn in line with the angle of the pages from the book.

Storytelling from Ripley's Adventure

The game was enjoyable to make, and it was great to work as part of such a strong team. The other members of the team were:

• Reece Giles - Project Manager
• Anna Zderadičková - Main artist
• Rhys Blackett - Artist
• Cameron Doherty - Writer
• Jake Thompson - Puzzle Designer

A full playthrough of the game is available below: