Crate Corruption is a love letter to the Crash Bandicoot series, a crate-breaking puzzle platformer with a few added twists. It's fully solo developed, including the engine, which I wrote from scratch in Java. Everything except some royalty-free music is my own work. I built it over a month for a second-year university assignment, deliberately stepping outside my comfort zone to understand what engines like Unity are actually doing under the hood.
Embedded Files
For level design I used Tiled, a tile map editor that outputs XML. My first pass was a basic Level Loader that parsed tile IDs and spawned prefabs based on hardcoded values, which quickly became a problem when editing the tile set reshuffled the IDs. I rebuilt it to use custom properties on each tile instead, mapping names to prefabs at runtime rather than relying on IDs at all. I also made use of Tiled's object layers to place unique NPCs with custom dialogue and freeform positioning, and eventually got autotiling working, which let me build natural-looking terrain much faster than placing individual tiles by hand. Tiled ended up becoming central to the entire level pipeline.
Early on I noticed a noticeable delay when the game started up, caused by each sprite independently reading its image file from disk. I fixed this by centralising all asset loading into a single AssetLoader class that caches each resource on first load so subsequent requests for the same file return the cached data immediately rather than hitting the filesystem again. The class handled images, audio clips, and JSON data, and also supported loading and caching sliced sections of sprite sheets. I kept all file paths in a dedicated constants class to avoid scattering string literals through the codebase, making it easy to reorganise assets during development without hunting down broken references.
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