The Finish Line
Guys, guys! It’s been a while since we went silent as we submerged ourselves into our game project, but we are now emerging with something of a masterpiece!
In only ten weeks, we are proud to present our game, MILK! To be honest, we did more than we had planned and it turned out to be one of the coolest projects yet.
Check it out here!
Everything you need to know about this awesome game is in this documentation here.
It’s been quite the quarter, and needless to say, it’s been quite the adventure. We finished right on time, and the only thing left is our presentation on Tuesday, December 6th from 1-3pm at UC Irvine. Come check us out at our booth!
Houston, We Have A Problem
Interestingly enough, but not too surprisingly, we’ve run into a couple important problems with our current game.
Our idea of followers seemed simple enough at the beginning, but as we continued to develop the game, it started giving us some complications. For one, we got stuck at the health system concept; we weren’t sure if each character in the group would have their own health, or if there would just be one health for the whole group. Another complication was the battle system. When it comes to monsters, should the characters attack all at once? Or one at a time? What does the main character do? Does he have any skills? It went on and on like that.
Eventually, we settled on having the main character just be the leader who calls on each of the followers to fight, which meant each of the followers would fight individually, one at a time. This also meant that each player gets his or her own health, and health decreases depending on the monster or boss; some characters are weak against certain monsters, but stronger against others, and the player gets to have fun with it and goes through a trial and error process to see what works and what doesn’t.
We also found that as we kept planning out the game, it got really convoluted; everything we wanted in the game would take more than just ten mere weeks to finish. At that point, our game ideas were heading towards something that would sound nice on Steam (hopefully). So we had to start limiting ourselves to make things simpler, or else we would never have any working game by the time we needed to present it. Some other good news was that professor said we only need to have a working level completed, not the entire game.
We narrowed things down, and put some tasks in order so that our game would be developed in a fashion that would ensure we’d have something working each step along the way.
First, we need to get the mechanics of the game working: have just one character be able to walk around on a map (without collision yet). Simple enough.
After that, we need to work on collision, be able to have more than one follower and make it so that followers are able to walk through each other (to avoid getting trapped in tight areas).
After these key points are done, we need to work on the script and the story. Throughout these weeks, we’re going to slowly build the documentation and the website to support the game.
The Beginning
And so we begin!
We weren’t sure what to expect, but we’re sure that a lot of us only thought of this class as a course that we needed to pass to check it off of our course list.
Right off the bat on the first day, we were already making groups and planning our game. However, it wasn’t just a game we had to make. We also needed to market our game, hype it up, and everything in between.
Basically, we are going to learn what it takes to be a gaming company in ten weeks.
We had some good ideas passed around, and we eventually settled on making an awesome RPG (role-playing game). One thing that would make the game different from other RPGs are making it a parody of an RPG along with the concept of “followers” in the game, where the main character gains other characters who will fight for him.
As for the rest, I guess we’ll just see what happens in the remaining nine weeks! This is the beginning of our first game!
