Students often experience stress as a by-product of their daily learning experience. Ascension is a simple 2D rogue-like game that aims to allow students to release stress by challenging their mechanical skills through real-time combat equipped with an upgrade system and a variety of enemies, including a boss.

Ascension was created through the RAD approach. An initial defining and understanding stage involved rough sketches that identified desired components of the game (e.g. real-time combat). Then, a planning stage used Gantt charts and further sketches to map out what would be included. These plans were implemented through Unity Engine and Pixelorama, where Jun was tasked to create sprites and Jihun mainly worked on the Unity project. The physics and mechanics were established first, then the UI, and assets (including sprites and music) were incorporated in. The results were play-tested and debugged to produce the final functional product.

The resultant game was sufficiently challenging to engage students, especially the strategy aspect of picking a build path through the upgrade system. However, due to time constraints, the game is quite short and has less variety of enemies than desired, and may have some undiscovered bugs.

Our game benefits users by training their hand-eye coordination, and also provides an avenue of escape for real-life struggles. Group members learned the importance of communication for efficient teamwork and remaining organised when implementing code to ensure that it is easier to maintain in the future.