Open World Game - Explore Utah Valley

PROPOSED BY: Jeremy Lewis

My favorite gaming experience is exploring an open world. Games like Breath of the Wild reward you for exploring an area and finding hidden items and achievements. I would like to make a open world based on Utah Valley -- a place we all have a good reference for.

In the game you could walk around and explore a map based (loosely) on Utah Valley that we would create -- from Lehi to Spanish Fork surrounded on 4 sides by mountains. Around the map you would find fun items or achievements that are related to the real world locations that correspond to that area (i.e. Springville art museum, Utah Lake state park, a grove of trees in Pleasant Grove, dinosaur bones at thanksgiving point, Spanish Fork rodeo, BYU, UVU, Y trailhead, Adobe and Domo headquarters, Saratoga hot springs, American Fork steel mills, etc.). Maybe there is a larger plot that could be added, but for simplicity the game could just be based around the exploration concept.

We could use something like raylib with C++, or if students have taken CS 355 and the classes after that we could work on rendering our object arrays manually to a screen. To avoid rendering the entire map at once, we could use work arounds like only rendering a circle around the player, and then scaling and pasting the mountains into the horizon to create an illusion of far away places existing and how close you are to the world border.

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Interested People:

Jeremy Lewis