Hot Air Balloon is my final project for my Game Architecture course at Champlain College. For the final project, teams of two were challenged to recreate an actual game using only C++ and a programming library different from the one we used in class. Throughout the semester, the course used Allegro 5 as the main programming library. Our professor taught us how to encapsulate the graphics portion of our code, allowing for more straightforward library switching when necessary. The final project tested our ability to switch out the existing library, so my partner and I selected SDL as our choice. It has a similar structure to Allegro, making it easier and more time-effective to learn.

Hot Air Balloon is a spin-off of the classic Helicopter game, but instead of avoiding walls, your goal is to dodge other hot air balloons.

To get a better feel for the gameplay, here is a short trailer:

Development

I am a big fan of backend architecture design, so this project was enjoyable for me to develop. Over the five weeks, I worked on every system in the game including, player movement, localization, sound, music, UI development, level creation/object spawning, scene management, and a working gameplay loop.

Gameplay Pictures

Playable Download

If you would like to download Hot Air Balloon and play it for yourself, here is a playable version for Windows computers. To play, make sure to extract the zip file before running the executable.

Repository

Champlain College uses an internal repository tool, but for convenience, I have ported the codebase to GitHub for easy viewing of the code—my GitHub is Andy608.