Wizard Run was created by Milo Fisher, Bill Wong, Mark Wolverton, Zirui Li and was made for the Game Development Experience class at UC Santa Cruz. In this game, the player controls a wizard running through a dungeon. The wizard encounters 4 different types of traps in this dungeon, and must use various forms of movement and magic to avoid them. For the first trap, the spike traps on the ground, the wizard must simply jump over them. The next trap, the closing door, requires the wizard to slide under it. The third trap, the barrels blocking the way, need the wizard to destroy them using a fireball. The last trap, the chasm in the ground, is too long for the wizard to jump, so the wizard must glide over it. These traps are randomly generated for each level, and as the player clears the levels, the speed the wizard runs at and the tempo of the music both increase.

On this project, I was the game designer and programmer. I designed the traps the wizard will encounter as well as the different abilities that the wizard can use to avoid them. For the assignment this game was made for, our team was tasked with designing an endless runner game. To make our game unique from most other endless runners, I designed 4 abilities for the player instead of only using the most common controls like jump or slide. With our character being a wizard, I decided to make 2 abilities characteristic of an endless runner (jump and slide) and 2 abilities inspired by wizard magic (cloud glide and fireball).

To match these 4 abilities, I designed 4 traps that each require the use of a different ability. The spike trap requires the player to jump over it, and at higher levels, requires the player to press slide immediately after to fall faster or to hold glide after to go over multiple spikes. The closing door trap requires the player to slide under it, but the player can hold slide indefinitely to safely pass under multiple closing doors in a row. The barrels trap require the player to destroy it with a fireball, but at higher levels, it is more effective for the player to constantly be shooting fireballs to instantly destroy any barrels that might show up. The chasm trap requires the player to jump then hold glide to clear it, and this is the only trap that is harder when the game is slower, but gets easier the faster the player is going.

As the programmer of our team as well, I implemented each of these wizard abilities and traps, plus the random level generation and speed increases. For the wizard abilities, the jump simply gives the player an upward velocity upon the button press. For the slide ability, the player's hitbox is changed to match the sliding animation which fits under the sliding door. For the fireball ability, I created a projectile object that travels at a constant rate compared to screen position rather than world position to always move faster than the player, and had simple collision checking with barrels. Finally, for the glide ability, I simply made it so that while the button is held, the gravity rate is significantly reduced, creating a slow fall effect.

The traps were for the most part easier to create than the wizard abilities, but the one exception was the closing door. The spike traps and barrels checked if the player collided with them, ending the game if so and the chasm would end the game if the player fell below a certain height. The closing door trap, however, required some math to calculate the closing rate so that it would be just high enough for the wizard to slide under as the wizard was passing the trap.

In order to generate the trap layouts in the levels, the game would spawn the traps in chunks, preventing certain combinations of traps that were too difficult to consistently navigate. Each level had a certain amount of traps generated, that upon completions would trigger the next level to occur. When the next level is activate, the speed of the wizard and the tempo of the music both would increase.