Dragonfly Engine
In a course at Worcester Polytechnic Institute under Mark Claypool, I built a bullet-hell (“danmaku”) style game using a custom text-based engine implemented from scratch in C++ (Dragonfly). The project required designing engine systems and gameplay to emulate the intense patterns and fast reflexes of the Touhou series.
Position:
- Programmer
This project was part of the “Building Virtual Worlds / Game Engine Development” curriculum, in which students build a 2D text-based game engine (Dragonfly) in C++ from the ground up, then create a game using that engine. Under Mark Claypool’s guidance, I implemented engine core components: game loop, object and world management, event system, drawing of ASCII/text-based sprites, input handling, collision detection, performance/logging, etc. Then I designed a danmaku shooter inspired by the Touhou series: patterns of projectiles, player hitboxes, bullet wave timing, increasing difficulty, and visual feedback (within the limits of text/ASCII graphics). The goal was to reproduce the feel of bullet‐spraying chaos while respecting the constraints of Dragonfly (no high-resolution raster graphics, everything in text/characters), so it forced me to think carefully about readability, performance, timing, and designing patterns that are challenging but fair.