A fantasy videogame designed by University of Lincoln graduates has been listed in the top 51 British games to look out for this year and could soon be released on one of the largest PC gaming marketplaces.
In Hashtag Dungeon players can generate and share their own content via Twitter. Top videogame blog Kotaku UK has now listed it in its Top 51 British games to look out for in 2015.
Following its launch on PC devices in July 2014, the game has also been Greenlit for development on Steam, one of the largest digital distribution networks. On release Hashtag Dungeon will join more than 3,700 games available through Steam, which has 100 million active users.
Developed by Sean Oxspring and Kieran Hicks, as a project for their Games Computing undergraduate degree at the University of Lincoln, UK, the game has been compared to Nintendo’s original Zelda.
Hashtag Dungeon is unique, in that rather than procedurally generating its own content, the game is tied to Twitter’s data stream which tweets out the code that becomes a whole new level of dungeon generation.
Players can use the in-game editor to tweet out their own dungeons, messages and monsters creating a unique dungeon-crawling experience. This allows anyone to play and perhaps collaboratively add to the design of the dungeon.
Kieran, who is currently a postgraduate Research Student at the University of Lincoln, explained: “Hashtag Dungeon was developed with the hope of fostering an active and involved community. Using Twitter as the means to generate dungeons helps to accomplish this. The whole game is built to be as social as possible; the room design system has a lot of depth to it to allow players to feel like they have control and can make design decisions.”
Freelance games developer and Computer Science trainee teacher, Sean, added: “We have been blown away by the brilliant reception the game has received from the gaming press, players and our fellow game developers. Being Greenlit on Steam has motivated us to make the game bigger and better than ever, fostering a community of dungeon masters and dungeoneers that can chat and form friendships over Twitter and through the game itself.”
The duo also has several new games in the pipeline that use random streams of live data, such as those from Wikipedia and weather stations.
To find out more go to www.hashtagdungeon.com or send the developers a tweet at their respective Twitter accounts: @OxyOxspring and @Kieran_Hicks
