Turtle War

Game Design Project for Uni

One of our first year game design units at uni didn't presume programming experience and was more focused on design concepts, so our work was done in Kodu (software by Microsoft intended for use in schools). After demonstrating our knowledge of design by making small Kodu games throughout the year our final project was to make a full game, with more marks being available the more complex we made our game.

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My tutor encouraged me to go all out with this assignment so I just went wild trying to make the most extravagant game possible that pushed Kodu to its limits. The result was Turtle War, an open world RPG with permadeath and randomly generated characters assigned to you on each death.

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Let me tell you - Kodu was not meant for this at all. I had to make use of so many clever exploits I discovered by tweaking and re-purposing just about all of its features. For example, Kodu has strict memory limits enforced which I exhausted after designing a single segment of my world. To get around this I shrunk everything down to the smallest size possible; you can't tell while playing because the camera zooms in as far as it can.

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I went totally overboard adding enemies, quests, biomes... just about anything I could to the game. I admit, I was showing off a bit by the end. Kodu was screaming for help.

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Click the button below to download the design documentation I made for Turtle War as well as the Kodu file for the game itself. It requires Kodu to play and the program has been updated many times in the years since so I'm not sure if it's still compatible or not.