Current project Deep Sea Dragon Dash
2 year individual project, 2023-2025
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Deep Sea Dragon Dash is a project I am working on extracurricularly together with my sister. It is a casual mobile game with a style similar to games like Geometry Dash and Jetpack Joyride. In this side-scrolling game, the player must progress as far as possible, dodging obstacles and defeating enemies with their flames. Additionally, the player can collect coins to acquire skins for the dragon and complete daily missions to earn extra coins. During the game, the player must tap the screen to submerge the dragon and release it to make it leap upwards, allowing them to jump over obstacles and perform an extra air jump. They can also pick up power-ups that temporarily enhance the dragon's abilities.
Deep Sea Dragon Dash is a PEGI 3 game, designed to attract a young audience or people making long commutes. For this reason, the visual style is cartoonish and playful, with an easily recognizable interface and attractive, colorful designs.
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT
This project began as a simple web game developed in HTML and JavaScript. My initial goal was to create a fun and accessible experience for browsers. However, as development progressed, I decided to expand its scope and turn it into a mobile app.
For the Android version, I used Android Studio and a WebView, which allowed me to adapt the game for mobile devices without rewriting all the code. This initial Android version gave me the opportunity to explore the distribution process on the Play Store and to better understand the limitations and opportunities on mobile platforms.
Currently, I am recreating the project in Unity to implement advanced features like ads and a database to store players' scores. This change will also allow for improved performance and a better user experience on mobile devices, offering a more polished and professional experience.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
When I began developing Deep Sea Dragon Dash, I had not implemented advanced design patterns, as the first version of the game, in HTML and JavaScript, was created with basic Object-Oriented Programming knowledge. This initial version used a GameLoop in JavaScript to manage game logic and constantly update rendering, but it didn’t implement other patterns.
In the current version, developed in Unity, I am integrating additional design patterns to better organize the code and facilitate the project’s growth. These include the Observer pattern to manage events like coin collection and booster activation, allowing these elements to update automatically without rigid dependencies. I am also using Unity’s Entity-Component pattern to provide flexibility in component management and the Singleton pattern to handle global player settings, ensuring a central instance accessible throughout the project.
