The end is nigh! (week 12)

The end of trimester draws near and it honestly feels very sad because after having one of the most enjoyable schooling experiences I’ve ever had, I’ve come to the realization that I may never work with the lovely people at the Republic of cheerful ever again. This week has been one to remember as we were able to showcase our hard work at a public venue, a crowd of people laughing and smiling as they shoot cars into each other in The Cosmic Crucible of Chaos. You really had to be there to understand the enjoyment of it all. Perhaps this may happen again if we decide to continue working on the game in the future (hint hint) but hopefully to a much larger extent.

At the beginning of the project I was elected as an artist for our game Artery (which is now the cosmic crucible of chaos) as that is primarily my strong suit, but I did not think that I would be working on a pixelated game as I thought it was a bit clichéd to gain appeal from nostalgia. I also knew about the limitations of pixel art to an extent as I have used Game Maker through a fair amount of my childhood. I attempted to convince the team to try other means such as more detailed sprites using fully fledged drawings which use high amounts of detail, that idea was rejected because I was not the only artist in the group and he hadn’t had much experience outside of pixel art. 

Because we stuck with pixel art, when it was recommended that we check out Voxel graphics by a tester, I tried my hardest to convince my team to work with that art style and they were actually on board with it. Unfortunately that didn’t work out either because we had some technical issues that prevented us from using them in our game. After all that I realized when working in a team, you can’t let your ego take over the project, this also applies to the real world; just because I enjoy the concept of a video game I’m creating doesn’t mean that my  audience will.

From the beginning it seemed like my team leader knew what he wanted to do, but as the project further developed it changed immensely from what the idea originally was. As explained in a much older blog post we wanted to explore the heart-monitoring technology available in the iPhone 6 and use that to determine the character you play as in the game, eventually we decided that using the heart rate monitor which takes about 10 seconds, in between game sessions to determine your character would really take the enjoyment out of playing an action game and we also had no idea how we would implement such a thing and if we actually could, so we scrapped that entirely. Each character had different stats and had 1 static unchangeable weapon that had different mechanics, these stats included the standard things you see in games such as damage, health and speed; after the removal of the heart rate monitor concept we got rid of the stats as we didn’t want people to choose characters because of the stats they have instead of because they actually enjoy the character.

we were initially going to have 4 stages but we decided that completing 4 stages would be extremely difficult in our time constraints, these 4 stages were traffic troubles where you are on a highway shooting traffic at your enemy, raging river; a river where marine vehicles and crocodiles are constantly rushing through, slippery slopes which takes place on a snowy mountain and crazy canyon where you push large wild animals and safari cars into each other. Unfortunately we dropped the crazy canyon level as the sprites would require much more animation then the other stages. Currently all the stages have the same mechanics because  of the intense time constraints but if we were to work on the project in the future we would definitely implement the level mechanics to differentiate the gameplay between the stages. Hopefully at some point in the future people will be able to play the crazy canyon stage we once had to remove.

Also the way we handled the available weaponry changed throughout the process of the project, it started as a staple to each character, for example the Bear with the shotgun, then over time it progressed to weapons you   could choose in the character select screen, we didn’t think there was anything wrong with that but after getting people to test the game, power ups came up quite often so eventually the weapons were handled through power ups which in  all honesty is much more enjoyable because of the variety and randomization in each match of the game. This is the longest I’ve worked on any single project and I learnt a great deal about the amount of change that can occur over the development of a game, and some of the benefits of such changes as explained earlier. 

My team at the republic of cheerful were one of the best groups of people I’ve ever worked with and it was an honour working with them along with my amazing lecturers who supported our work and helped us understand things we wouldn’t really normally, such as where we were messing up and how we could fix certain issues we came across in our game. Generally everyone in our studio class were awesome and it really felt like we are a big happy videogame developing family.