Over the course of the last three weeks me and my team was tasked at creating three prototypes (each with a development time of a single week) with the intent of picking one of these three to continue development through the rest of the semester. With our team of two programmers, one artist, one designer, and one producer we set off to work.

Our current team

Alexander Hubble – Programmer; Niklaus Bair – Programmer

Andrew Chepega – Designer 

Samantha Arehart – Artist

John (Alex) Stopen – Producer

Prototype 1: “The Rocket Knights of Castle Neon”

This is a game where two players go head to head in a jousting arena, except the horses are rocket powered. As the player’s break they begin to charge their boost. The interesting part of this project was getting the player movement to feel good. It had to be tight enough that the players felt like they were int control but not too tight to remove some of the chaos away from the game.  My job on this project was to focus on getting the movement to feel fantastic, I feel like I achieved this fairly well for having a week to work on it! This project was really fun to work on, I love working on party style games and this one was a blast!

Prototype 2: “Battle Beetles and Friends”

This game is a simple RTS style tower defense where you are attempting to stop a swarm of ants from devouring your sandwich. Essentially you throw AI controlled bugs onto a field where swarms of ants attempt to eat your sandwich. The hardest part of this is simply the sheer volume of things to get done within the week, we had to get throwing feeling good, get AI working for both the ants and the player’s units, and have a completed game loop. We did this by having Nik focus on making the systems and AI while I focused on getting the throwing and game play loop in. This was an interesting project, I have never worked on a strategy game before and this was a new experience!

Prototype 3: “Gaze of the Abyss”

Imagination a two player game, where only one player has a camera. This is Gaze of the Abyss. This cooperative horror game takes place in a sunken ship where the players play as a diver and a drone, but the diver’s camera is broken. Basically it summarizes down to a cooperative puzzle game with a tense atmosphere where only one player controls the joint camera. Programming this one has been tricky to say the least, mainly getting the game to feel correct. Once again I have been tasked with game-play and Nik has been tasked with systems. Most of the time I have spent has been trying to get the physics and movement to simultaneously feel like they are underwater and not feel awful for the players considering they have a single camera. Most of the issues has come down to finagling Unity’s built in physics system to feel correct, getting the camera’s controls was fairly simple, but the diver has been some trouble.

Moving forward!

So the question becomes, what prototype will go forward? We decided as a team that it will be… Gaze of the Abyss! This game satisfies everything that the team wants, as well as being an incredibly cool game! We have already put two weeks worth of work into this one (as opposed to one week for the other two) and we are preparing to go onto the next step, the Midmortem presentation. Here all the teams in the class of 2020 will present their games, and two teams from every class will be cut and merged into the others. This will all be decided soon, only time will tell what will come next!

Trailer for Midmortem!

Here is a quick trailer that we made for Midmortem!