Azucena: a game built on a custom C++ engine

Azucena has been my first complete game! I made this game as a university coursework, and the project included a pitch presentation and a game design document.

I took inspiration mainly from two games: The Legend of Zelda and Hyper Light Drifter. You play as Azucena, a llama who has to rescue her three babies. Each of them is waiting at the end of a level and the levels can be visited in any order.

It runs on an engine built from scratch in C++, with the help of SFML and Box2D. The pieces are the same you would expect to find in any game engine: scenes, entities, components, etc. The game has all the basic technical features necessary to consider a game a game, for example: a menu, save and load, a tutorial, an ending, sounds and music, support for different screen resolutions, remappable controls and joystick support.

Before this project, I used to use Unity for very simple tasks, without having a deep understanding of the engine and its potential. But after completing it I saw the light! This small game was a turning point because it made game engine architectures very clear for me.