Johns Hopkins University Game Design  Summer Program

In the summer of 2021, I attended a three week game design course offered by the Johns Hopkins university's Center for Talented Youth. From Monday to Friday, we would learn the principles of game design and the most important factors that goes into making a game great. One example of great game design can be found in the video game Tomb Raider, where apparently in the beginning of the game, the player goes into a flashback of Lara Croft in her childhood training, and what makes this such great game design is the fact that the flashback simultaneously acts as a tutorial for the player and a plot device, as Lara Croft needed to recall the skills she learned and practiced for years in order to get out of a tense situation. 

In the last week of the course, my instructor assigned us a final project to make by ourselves. Students could create board games and adventure games, and I chose to create an adventure game using Twine Engine. Twine Engine is a free open-source tool for making interactive fiction and hypertext fiction in the form of web pages. I wanted to make an adventure game based around the idea of the transcontinental railroad. For me, the story of the construction transcontinental railroad is my favorite part of United States history, as it was mostly constructed by thousands of Chinese laborers who took part in one of the United States' greatest technological feats. I settled on the idea of a nameless explorer who, one day, comes across an abandoned cave, and as they explore, the cave begins to collapse and the explorer must navigate through the cave, pick up railroad parts, and repair a broken railroad line in order to escape. 

Play the Game!

https://evch3ng.itch.io/cave-escape