Armor, jewels, and monsters lurking in coal mines– this is the world computer science junior Sheridan Rathbun envisioned and brought to life in a game called “Barony”.

Rathbun said Barony is a role-playing video game on the computer based in a town called Hamlet. Once a utopia, Rathbun said that Hamlet was exploited by a baron named Baron Herx, who was eventually trapped in the coal mines beneath the town.

“So, many years after this, you’re like this hero person and you’re going to go into the mines for your own reasons to kind of set things right,” Rathbun said.

Rathbun said the game is not yet finished, but the ending is set to be a battle with the baron himself. Though the game is ultimately won by defeating the baron, a big part of the game, Rathbun said, is the adventure itself.

“You have to delve deeper and deeper and you begin to discover this strange underground world,” he said.

Rathbun said he’s always been a lover of video games, and the idea to create Barony came to him when he started college.

“My first year here was kind of depressing to me, because I spent most of my free time making games and programming,” Rathbun said. “Coming here changed that, and I spent all of my time studying stuff I had minimal interest in.”

He said to cope, he began working on the game.

Barony eventually became such an excessive project, Rathbun said, that he had to search for more help and more free time. He said he found help by recruiting other gamers from an online video game discussion board, and the free time by a little prioritizing.

“I didn’t have a team that was depending on me,” Rathbun said about of the early stages of the game. “Then I built up my team, and the project was taking up even more time. The following semester I started cracking.”

Rathbun said he dropped half of his classes the spring semester of 2014, and all of his classes as of mid-October.

Other member of the team are Chris Kukla, musician and sound design; Ciprian Ilies, programming and additional design; Julian Seeger, character artist; Frasier Panton, writer and Mathias Golinelli, texture artist and additional art.

Kukla, who was in charge of the music aspect of the game, said the Barony game was largely trial and error on his part.

“There few a few concept pieces that I wrote that were good, and worked well in the game, but I always thought there was a style that could better represent the aesthetics and mechanics of Barony,” Kukla said.

Kukla said he not only created the soundtrack to Barony, but designed all of the audio—from doors opening and goblins roaring to the footsteps of players in the game.

Though Kukla said he enjoys music composition and does so primarily for a living, he said his favorite part of working on this particular game were the people involved.

“Barony has a great team and that really helps development. We certainly talk about things other than the game, and we’ve all become internet friends in my mind,” Kukla said.

In an effort to obtain more feedback on the game, Rathbun hosted a public testing party in the Life Sciences building on Fri., Oct. 24. Rathbun said he wanted to see users’ first impressions.

Justin Jarvis, music performance freshman, attended the testing and was first to play Barony that evening.

“I thought it was really cool. I like playing rogue-like games that change each time you start over,” Jarvis said.

When asked if this is a game he would play in his free time, he said, “Yeah, I really would. Especially on multi-player.”

Rathbun said the game is only 60-70% complete, but the current version has been submitted to the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco, and expects to get a response within a few months.

As far as plans to return to his studies, Rathbun said has none.

“I can’t do it all, I’m not Superman,” Rathbun said. “This is my priority—far more than school or whatever. This is what I have to do.”

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