Ludus Numerous

The original Ludus Numerous was written in 2006 as a School Project for the Technology Student Association competition. I (Alexander Davis) did all the coding for the game, while my partner, Ian Wyman did all the modeling with a program known as Milkshape 3D. The object was simple, there were 10 pillars with Roman Numerals on them scattered across the map and you needed to collect them in order. This game was written completly in C++ and DirectX 9. Sadly, this resulted in the game not working on the Judges computer because they did not have the correct software installed and the game was not sophisticated enough to install the software it needed.

Later on, I added on to the original game by adding a second level / version and the game prompted the user to choose what version to play. This second version was a slightly different gameplay featuring a new map and new gameplay. In this iteration, there were 2 sets of pillars, one with Western Numbers and the other with Roman Numerals. It also featured a HUD and Minimap that showed your progress. This version allowed you to collect the Numerals in any order as long as you grabbed the matching Number. It would show on the HUD when ever you collected a Numeral allowing you to then go and find the matching number. Finding a match would increase your score while getting the match wrong would decrease your score.

I had intially planned to compete again with the updated game but decided to do a different competition leaving the game unfinished. However, over the next few years, I occasionally made small improvements to the second version. Most recently, I updated it to work on Windows 10 in 1080p as a borderless window. Originally, the game was designed for 1024x768 and forced you into full screen. That worked fine with one monitor but did not work well with multiple monitors.

I also attempted to remake the game once before using the Unreal Development Kit (UE3) for a College Project, however due to my inexperience with the engine at the time, that version ended up having less content that the original and was rather short lived.

The current iteration of Ludus Numerous is planned to be written in C# using Unity. This will allow it to take advantage of a very robust game engine. In hindsight, if Unity was around in 2006, I would have used that instead of writing the entire game from scratch. (I think it was around then but it was not very well known).