Quest for the Dungeon Treasure is a game I developed as part of a console programming course at Abertay University. It was created on a standard PlayStation 2 loaded with the Linux operating system available here and the Direct PS2 Access Environment available here. As such the game is limited to only being playable on similar systems, however the work taken during production is equivalent to that required when programming an official Playstation dev kit, i.e. dealing with the vector units, processing joy-pad inputs, being mindful of the limited amount of memory available.

The aim of the game is to guide an adventurous dwarf through a maze to collect a series of treasure chests. He then has to return to his starting point to escape with the loot. However in his way are a number of beasts which roam each of the mazes and would like nothing better than to eat him. The player has the choice of either fleeing from the enemy and hiding until they pass, or they can try to fight. However the dwarf gets tired easily so can only perform a limited number of attacks. This means the player has to strategically decide whether it is better to fight or flee.

Features of the game include interactive menus, 3 difficulty levels with increasingly large mazes, numbers of enemies and treasure chests, completed random maze designs generated at runtime using a recursive backtracking algorithm, vector unit based graphics and a rule-based AI system designed to minimise processing overheads by evenly distributing the work.

Although you will require a PS2 with the modifications above to run this game, you can still download the archive to see the source code. Also if you want to know more about  what is going on within this program, please download the project document.

Quest for the Dungeon Treasure Archive (.zip, 1.5 MB)
Project Document (.doc, 102 kB)