The End of the Beginning (or the First Semester of a Grad Program)

I realize today that my final first semester blog post never made it to the posting machine, which is what I call my computer. A large reason this never happened was that I spent a bunch of time writing a game design document for a game I'm calling The Next Dragon. You can check out the game design document in Google Docs here. For reading inspiration, it's a first person fighting game based on the cheesy theme of 70's and 80's Kung Fu movies. See Sho'nuff (he's pretty great):

I'm going to go ahead and embed the pdf version below. I can't vouch for the usability or quality of Slideshare in regards to pdf's, but if you're lazy and don't want to follow the link, here you go:

And just in case you're a real glutton for punishment, you can go read my thesis paper for the above design document. It's mostly about spatial presence and immersion, and how that can be enhanced using diegetic and meta-perception user interface elements. Read it here; it's a fun read.

So, the burning question on everyone's mind must be: how did Goobles end? Unfortunately Unity has some terrible version control issues that were a problem. We spent a great deal of time merging code together. It started to feel towards the end that we were learning how to wrangle Unity with a team of this size, but we were hurting for a bit there. I did my best to figure out how to handle version control, and with my efforts combined with a couple of the engineers we were able to handle it well enough. Overall we eventually got everything working together and produced a very fun game. Probably the best prototype I was a part of this semester. Check out a screen of the final product:

This was an odd project. With so many producers it felt at times we were scrambling to find things to do. With three of us, the third producer lagged behind somewhat. He initially started out very helpful but then failed to make a move to be involved with the prototype. I blame myself somewhat for this, as I could have done more to try to include him. In my mind, if he wanted to be busy and helpful he would have. On the other hand, if I would have just assigned him more tasks he might have done them. I was caught off guard by a fellow producer failing to meet my expectations. In the future, I would attempt to massage the issue a little bit and work on including people who feel excluded. Overall though, great project with a great result.

After the semester was over, I had a nice three week break where I worked on a game for a competition from Ubisoft. The theme was "Space: The Untamed Beast." It had various requirements such as being a third-person game where the character was always in view and having three types of hostile enemies. Winners of the competition get to intern at Ubisoft for a couple months and make their game. This is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately, I was only able to drum up three other people for my team. The EAE program had to have a mini-competition to pick which game would be submitted to the actual competition and by the time I found the people I wanted to work with, most everyone was on a team already.So my team ended up being myself, Triston, Yang, and Yuntao, which is four people for a possible eight person team, with no artist. We were starting in a hole, that's for sure.

How did it go? Eh, alright. We spent a lot of time working on our design, and I think we hit on a dynamite idea. Unfortunately, a couple of us had plans to leave Salt Lake for the break, and we just didn't get the prototype done. We decided to pitch anyway, mostly on the strength of our idea alone, and it turned out like this:

I don't want to spend too much time on it, but the idea was that the player was the spirit of a star who was trying to create her own solar system right after the big bang. The player would control an avatar, the star spirit, who would go around and collect the free-floating resources and create planets with them. Once the planets were created, the player would send them in motion around the star. I think it has a ton of potential, but we just didn't get there with our prototype. That's okay. I learned a lot from the brainstorming sessions, and this idea isn't going away.

Next time I'll discuss the first couple of weeks of my second semester (and that should be a much quicker post).