Hamono

One of the great things about being a college students is the long breaks. Dartmouth College was generous by having a six-week long winter break. Instead of letting those six weeks aimlessly pass by, a few friends decided to make a desktop game, ultimately called Hamono.

A Click-and-Drag Game

All of us loved playing video games, and realized that we could work together to make our own. There was five us in total:

Two designers: Young Jang and Lauren Gray

Two developers: Josiah Putman and me

One musical composer: Summer Cody

Our main focus of this project was to create something that was exciting but also manageable for a six-week time period. Within our break, we wanted to create a simple story line, a variety of enemies, two levels, and one boss level.

Design

The designers wanted to have a pixel art aesthetic, so the main tool that they used to create characters and their animations was Aseprite.

Before they designed the main character and her enemies, they wanted to know what the game mechanics were. Did we want the user to use their keyboard, a joystick, a touchscreen? After a few hours of brainstorming, we came up with the idea of having a click-and-drag experience.

With this mechanic in mind, the enemy characters had targets on different parts of their bodies. So the user had to make sure that they were clicking-and-dragging (or slashing) in the right direction. We thought this made for a more engaging gaming experience.

Tech

We used the game engine Unity to create the game. For the programming language, we went with C# because we found the documentation provided by Unity and the support from the game development community was stronger.

Here's the source code.

End Goal

We set out to make a game that we would enjoy playing. In the end, we created a game, though with bugs, was not only enjoyable but memorable. This was our first game; we learned a lot about the process in just six weeks.