Slashathlon (Demo)

Slashathlon is the result of a collaborative effort for a university exam in a Game Design and Development class. Developed by three Computer Science students over a month, the arcade game, whose to be made with the Android platform, was conceived taking into consideration the quick and immediate nature of these kind of mobile games. The game was built on the foundations of the framework taken from the text Beginning Android Games. Free art assets have been used and reworked as needed and among the features developed ad-hoc there is a screen drawing system for animated sprites and a data-driven level read/write utility.

The basic idea was applying the iconography and tropes of the party rpg genre to a single-player arcade runner on mobile, targeting an audience of expert players, and therefore guaranteeing a fair level of challenge with simple controls. While using spartan graphics, the game makes use of the color of the character and enemy sprites to suggest the interaction underlying the gameplay: the color matching between player-controlled and hostile characters controlled by the CPU.

The final demo consists of two levels. A video gameplay.