Garden of Táozi

Project Summary

Garden of Táozi is a Journey to the West inspired puzzle game where you solve puzzles, collect peaches, and catch glimpses of Sun Wukong’s journey to enlightenment. Experience the beauty of the heavenly gardens as you experiment with ever-more-elaborate puzzles, accompanied by gentle music. It’s about the journey, not the destination.

Garden of Táozi began as a Clark University game studio, and was completed by members the team in their downtime.

Contributions

• Designed a cohesive physics system from the ground up:

  • Grid-based movement and puzzle solving

  • Players can push boxes around the map

  • Different boxes have different movement rules

  • Convincingly fakes collision between players, boxes, and walls

  • Savestates of puzzle placements are logged, allowing a player to undo moves

• Implemented UI and integrated it with Camera:

  • Movement arrows rotate to compensate for camera rotation in real time

  • Camera can be cleanly swiveled with a finger swipe

• Level progression and Unlockables are tracked and displayed across sessions

• Various miscellaneous support across the entire project, including:

  • Source control management and review

  • Mobile touchscreen compatibility

Code Examples

Post Mortem

Despite a rocky start and several changes of direction, we did a good job realize a full game with the resources we had. While technically contracted by an entity, we were left mostly up to our own devices, and it’s a testament to the producer perseverance that we collected all their nebulous ideas into a cohesive game. Considering the scope of the game and the environment we had to work with (a once-weekly class), we had far too many people working together and simultaneously not enough work hours put in. Coordinating all these disparate and barely-communicating parts was by far the hardest part, but we managed to stick the landing pretty well in my option