OPS: Mission Complete!

Well, what can I say? Two years went by a lot faster than I thought it would. Maybe it's the way Full Sail crams everything together, maybe it's because I enjoy doing what I came to school for. Either way, this Friday is my graduation ceremony, and our Final Project game is complete. All in all I think it turned out really awesome. Read for the game concept and my mini postmortem.

OPS is a first person game, focused on movement instead of combat. In fact, there are no weapons for the player to use at all in the game. You play as a secret agent in training, trying to complete a virtual reality course that is controlled by the Battle Aptitude Readiness and Recon Intelligence (BARRI for short).

The gameplay mechanics are all about tension, keeping momentum, and using things like vaults and slides to make your way past obstacles and to the end of the course in time, with a focus on learning the courses and turret placement for faster future runs.

What Went Right

Time Management

The entire time we were working towards final project, everyone kept telling us that we would have crunch for all of our milestones. However, my team ended up meeting 6-7 days a week for at least 8 hours. That seems like a lot, but it was in a laid back environment, and other opinions were right there. The thought process was, we're coming to school to do this for a job, so why not treat it like one.

WWise

Man, WWise made sound integration so much easier for us, and took a lot of sound related issues off of our shoulders, and put them in the capable hands of our sound team. We fought back and forth for a while whether we should use Fmod or WWise, but in the end the latter made for much faster integration when it came down to it.

Scope

The scope of our game for the time frame we had was almost perfect, the only thing we had over scoped was the levels (14 total were designed, only 4 were used), which we did on purpose, so we could trim later. All we had to do was hammer out the basic mechanics and test in each level to make sure the level worked with the game.

What Went Wrong

Work Distribution

Even though we as a team didn't have any real crunch periods, individuals did, just due to an unbalanced workload. For instance, I knew Maya the best, so I handled all the placeholder models, the models we got to put in the game, tweaking the layout of the levels, and item placement in the levels. This of course was on top of what my duties as a coder were. The final week before turn in, I was scrambling to get assets in, with the sound and art guys making them faster than I could implement. At the same time however, there were people who had literally nothing to do. If we could do it again, Scheduling would be a big thing to reevaluate.

Math Libraries

I don't have a real problem with the XNA math library, which is what we ended up using. The big problem we ran into was in the first month, we switched math libraries 3 times. Not only did this take a little getting used to, but some of the team had to redo code up to three times to make up for the changes. In the end we figured out the XNA math library and how to use it, it just could have been handled in a more timely manner.

As of right now I can't think of anything else to add to this, so with that, you can find the game Here. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Structure of Game Design

So this past month, I had a class in which we were given one month to make a game of our choice. I chose to do a platformer which I called "Just Beyond".

The concept of it was you were a teddy bear who was accidentally dropped out a car window on a road trip, and spent every waking moment trying to find the boy who owned him. I'm pretty proud of what I achieved, however incomplete it may be (I plan to polish it up and put it up over spring break). However, The class taught me some really valuable lessons about designing a game.

Know your limits:

By limits, I mean both deadlines (time limits) and what you can achieve. I tend to have the attitude that whatever you put your mind to you can achieve, and I truly believe that. However, having the first game I made being a platformer with three different levels, all with (digitally) hand drawn graphics made by myself, that's a bit much to do in one month. I did get surprising amounts of it done, but unfortunately, alot of graphics fell by the wayside, which leads into another important fact...

Feature Creep:

It's called creep for a reason, those little "wouldn't it be cool if..." moments we ALL have that just slide into our minds while we're doing something. What makes it worse, is when you have an art program, or a compiler in front of you, you have the ability to try out that idea right then. Break that habit now, right now. It's great to have ideas, but when you have a plan, stick to it. Write the new ideas down, and set them aside, finishing what you have planned first, that's why you have the design doc. 

For instance, when I made the projectiles that my character throws (blueberries) I had them hit the ground, splat, then slowly drip and leak over the edge of the platform. It looked great, and it came from one of those "wouldn't it be cool if" moments, but I ended up spending an entire afternoon working on that, that could have been better spent getting my data saving and loading from the game. In the end, I had to disable that animation anyways, because I didn't have an animation for when they hit the walls, and didn't have time to make one.

Never Give up:

Take the term deadline seriously. The nights before both of my milestones were due, me and some buddies from class had study groups that lasted from 11am one morning to 5pm the next day. All of that was coding, with maybe a couple 10-20 minute breaks for food or caffeine. The point is, we were going to work our hardest to knock our games out of the park, even if that meant not sleeping til after we turned in the assignment and left class. If this is what you want to do, prove it to yourself, and your instructors, by stepping up to the plate and putting all your energy into what you're making. The game will come out better for it, and you'll have something you can be proud of in the end.

All in all the class was a great experience, and alot of fun. I have alot of things to keep in mind for my next projects, but having experienced them first hand, I'll be all the more prepared for them the next time they come around.