As BYU enters the stress of midterm season, computer science students have found reasons to laugh while designing their new video game, Dragon Kisser.
At the Talmage building on BYU campus, students are developing an opportunity so people can put their rizz to the test as a lovesick chicken trying to save a medieval Spanish village by romancing a dragon.
"Every once in a while you'll get fun, different, interesting, even wacky ideas," Seth Holladay, the capstone faculty advisor mentoring the game said.
And video game director, London McCombs, has loved leaning into how ‘wacky’ her idea is as she and her team develop backstories for the main characters: Domingo the chicken and Luciana the dragon.
"Domingo's so confident in himself. He's like, I can have anybody. And the chickens are like, no. He can't. He's insane," McCombs said.
And this lighthearted approach was what McCombs wanted from the very start of her idea.
Too freaked out to play games with more violent graphics, McCombs explained she wanted to create an alternative option that was just as challenging.
"I was like, I really wish there was a game for like people who loved, it was like hard and difficult like Elden Ring and it like had the similar mechanics except for like total wusses like me,” McCombs said.
But even the fun has required a lot of hard work. London oversees two sub teams to make sure components like character designs and programming are running smoothly,
"If you have an idea that can sound really fun, it just takes time to develop it, to talk about it, to try things," Holladay said.
No matter how rigorous the process, McCombs hopes the game will bring as much humor to others as it has her and her team.
"I've always thought comedy is like something that's really important that people kind of sometimes can take for granted," McCombs said.