Hexa Hiker
Mountaineering Madness
Find the right path up this speedy ascent, earn coins along the way to buy new and exciting characters, and unlock hidden characters by reaching high score milestones.
May 2017 - After nervously procrastinating the gargantuan task of learning game development from square one, my independent project for my 11th grade AP Computer Science class presented itself as the perfect opportunity to go all in. Slowly but surely, the pieces of this unexpectedly ambitious project fell into place as I became familiar with Unity, Blender, and C#. This is where I truly realized how much I enjoy making games as it was the perfect blend of creativity-driven art and technical problem solving. It was the most engaged I’d ever been in a school project and the only long-form high school project on which I got a grade of 100%.
Procedural Generation
Even though it is my first game, Hexa Hiker remains the most algorithmically complex of the games I’ve made. The original system took the 6 pre-made “blocks” or sets of platforms and placed them one after another based on magic placement numbers I manually entered into the code. The flaw with this system was that it spawned and destroyed the blocks as they treadmilled, which was absolute dog buns for memory. As the game sped up when the player reached higher scores, the performance would tank and render it pretty much unplayable. So when I was working on the 2018 update, not only did I add the level variants to keep things fresh, I also completely overhauled the level generation system. In the new design, the blocks are recycled as the game generates 14 random “flights” of blocks when loading and cycles between them randomly. This double-dipping of random generation keeps the game feeling genuinely random while eliminating the performance issues from before. This is one of my favorite programming challenges I’ve ever overcome and I still enjoy programming as an enabler for my art.
Until it be thoroughly finished
The build I turned in for that original AP Computer science is far from what you see today. When I turned in that project I knew I was far from finished. I wanted to go all the way— I wanted to launch it on the app stores. That summer I worked tirelessly to realize that dream and triumphantly launched it in October of that year. In 2018 I produced two updates for the game, one with adjustments based on player feedback and the other a substantial content update I made late at night after my shifts at the grocery store. Though the game has its flaws (it’s wicked hard), it was an incredible experience to produce and a true labor of love.