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!

What Games Mean

I've known for a long time what games are to me personally, and my belief that games can be more than just a fun experience, but an emotional and thought provoking one as well, is what has driven me more than anything to pursue this career.

Today I witnessed something that reaffirmed my personal belief in the way games touch people. There's a game called Passage by Jason Rohrer if you haven't played it yet, I DEMAND that you play it before you finish this blog post. Seriously, it takes only 5 minutes to complete, and if you don't play it now, it will be ruined forever for you below.

Played it?

Good. Now I seriously enjoyed Passage finding it one of the definitive art/indie games out there, a shining example of how emotions can tie into gameplay directly instead of visuals or sound. Well today in lecture our instructor, Keyvan mentioned it, and a couple of my buds in class, Kip and Josh, hadn't played it. Well on break they both loaded it up, and I got to see both of their reactions to it. Their differences in opinion were astonishing. 

Kip played through it, taking it on an emotional level, but without realizing that you could move up or down. Upon realizing this, he felt cheated and tried to explore with what time was left, but unfortunately time ran out for his companion. As he sat yelling at the screen about how it wasn't fair, time ran out for his character too, and the title faded to screen.  It was obvious by the look on his face that this game had affected him on a deep level.

Josh on the other hand, I could hear from the rows in front of me saying how it was the worst game he had ever played, completely pointless, and how he would rather play Shadow the Hedgehog than this game.

Now, neither opinion is wrong, and what I know about both of them, their reactions were fitting. That being said, Kip's reaction was more in line with what the developer had expected, and similar to the reaction I had the first time I played it. That kind of reaction however, the one that I felt, and the one I saw Kip have, is what drives me to make games. It's proof that games can be more than just games, just fun. It's proof that games can mean more.

In contrast however, Josh's reaction is proof that no game can reach everyone. That being said, if I can make a game that gets one person to react like Kip did to Passage, then I'll have achieved my goal as a designer.

Did you play Passage? what did you think? What are games to you?

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.

Game Design Challenge

After many a month of school, having this blog (that up to this point I've done nothing with due to time constraints) , and reading such sites as Gamasutra and GameCareerGuide, I have finally decided to start doing the GameCareerGuide Game Design Challenge. My hopes are that from this, I can help hone my design abilities in preperation for looking into a job in Game Design. I'll be sure to post here on how that goes as I work on it.

In school news, I'm into Programming 3 and Physics now here at Full Sail, and this course has been living up to my expectations so far. It's really challenging, but it's also alot of fun, and I find myself enjoying the challenges put infront of me. The schedule, however, I'm enjoying alot less. Here's to hoping that next month we won't have classes that end at 1am and start the next day at 9am.

On the subject of 'we', the class I'm a part of, as a whole, is really amazing. Just about everyone knows where they want to go and what they want to do when they are done here. This is probably the most solid class of people I've ever had the joy of learning with.

That being said, I'm off to prepare for Programming 3 (today is learning Exception Classes!).



Tom

The Beginning of the Road

Well, I made this blog to track my exploits throughout my school career, and into my true career after school. This is as much a tool for me as it can be for other people interested in game design, and it allows me some time to reflect on the things I've learned so far.

To start things off, let me explain a bit about myself. I've been interested in video games as far back as I can remember. I didn't really get into the concept of making games as a possible career until I was introduced to one of those RPG Maker programs when I was in the 6th or 7th grade. A year or two in that and I started to not only realize that I wanted to have even more control, but that this was truly what I wanted to do with my life. after that I spent a lot of my time learning computer animation with Maya and Blender, as well as started getting my feet wet in C++.

I first heard of Full Sail from a good friend of mine who was looking to go there as well. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but when I kept hearing the name, I decided to check it out. Needless to say, it seemed like the place for me, intense courses focused on Game Design. Flash forward about 3 years, and my dreams of going to Full Sail went from being just dreams, to me in my car full of belongings driving to Florida, in less than a months time.

That brings us to the here and now. At this point in time, I am about 5 weeks into school here, working through their Design Fundamentals and Principles of Programming classes. Look forward to most likely weekly, or even daily posts covering my progress through school towards my dream job.