Senior Production

Post IV

This week has been a bit of a crunch for the team and there is definitely a lot on our minds right now. With the challenge of the first stage in our not so distant future, we are scrambling to get all the requirements done in time to be able to actually move forward. While we could definitely spend a bit more time on this very prototype heavy phase of development, we are pretty sure we know what we want to do and what to move forward with. Before I reveal what we’ve decided to move forward with, I have more updates on what i’ve worked on this week!

BBR has gotten a little bit of a facelift and has progressed nicely into a game (albeit a pretty awful game). It needs a lot of work still, but that is to be expected as its an initial prototype. In this past week i’ve managed to get a scrolling texture on the floor, enemy spawning, basic enemy AI, shooting and killing. I also updated the 2D aspect which now has assets and has a slight camera improvement. This is kind of a long list of features so I think it would be best to show it with a quick video demonstration! This is the video we will be using to present gameplay of BBR this Wednesday when we challenge the first stage.

So now that brings me to the topic of our choice. The team and I had a long conversation on Monday, we weighed the pluses and minuses of each game. We talked about potential problems such as a light or heavy workload (for the game), needing certain resources down the road, potential technical problems, etc. It was pretty thorough and we were able to eliminate at least 1 game, leaving the decision down to two games instead of three. Our conversation continued for a little bit longer and we started to consider how other people (outside of the team) felt about the two remaining games and with that we came to a unanimous decision. We are making a survival game.

The winner was chosen for a few reasons. For starters, it was something we had talked about the most amongst ourselves. Almost every conversation we’ve had since introducing the idea has involved the idea in some way. There is very clearly excitement around it and when presenting our survival game to the class and other people, they definitely tend to respond quite well to the idea. We also decided to pick this idea because it gave us a lot room to craft the experience we want the player to have. Everything from the look, the feel, the sound and more. I personally voted for it because of the chance to mess with an interesting AI (the darkness/shadows) that will be ever present in the game. From a marketing side as well, this game is fairly viable because it would fit into the survival and potentially horror markets. This tends to appeal to a larger audience than Tower Defenses and Bullet Hells which makes it a more favorable pick. Overall, i’m pretty happy with our choice and while i’m sad to see BBR and the Tower Defense go away, i’m certain we will memorialize it in some way.

With that, I bring this post to a conclusion with a video of the game which we will be moving forward with.

TL;DR:

• BBR is a game now
• We are challenging the first stage
• We picked the survival game
• I’m excited for the AI