Quest for Dendoro

Quest for Dendoro is a 2.5D action-adventure RPG in which a hero must recover a magical amulet to save the village of Dendoro, developed at Northeastern University Oakland in collaboration with students from Mills College Children's School and San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Project Details

Genre: 2.5D action-adventure RPG
Platforms: WebGL, PC (intended for touchscreen)
Engine and tools: Unity, C#, GitHub
Team size: 5
Duration: October 2025 - December 2025 (3 months)
Status: Released December 2025

As Producer, Programmer, & Designer, I...

Established experience goals and development timeline for MVP of 2.5D RPG developed with 5-person team
Facilitated weekly standups for sharing updates, identifying blockers, and re-evaluating priorities, tracking progress using team log document and Trello board
Implemented core gameplay systems such as movement, interaction, combat, and puzzles with C# in Unity
Conducted playtests with target audience (children aged 9-11) to identify issues, evaluate needs, and improve design, such as designing mobile-friendly UI after discovering users' unfamiliarity with keyboard-and-mouse

Playtests and Iterations

Before we even started making the game, we met with the 4th and 5th graders at MCCS to play games with them and better understand their wants and needs. Through observing them play and talk about their favorite board games and video games, we found that they tended...

to prefer consistent participation rather than waiting to take turns
to prefer sidescrolling over third-person cameras for easier spatial judgment
to be unfamiliar with keyboard controls, using either one finger or two overlapping hands for directional keys
to love fantasy settings, with fantasy roleplay being a popular pasttime
to dislike conventional narratives such as rescuing a damsel in distress

Based on their preferences, we decided to create an action-adventure RPG in a fantasy setting with a narrative twist with touchscreen controls, iterating following playtests every two weeks.

Selected learnings:

Problem discovered: Some players struggled to understand where the colliders for 2D sprites in 3D space would be.
Solution: Increase hitbox size, decrease hurtbox size, and remove body collision damage, focusing on damage through telegraphed attacks.
Problem discovered: Players were confused about how long it took to defeat bosses, and bosses would sometimes die off screen.
Solution: Add boss healthbar to HUD so it is visible at all times, and add cutscene after boss is defeated.