Making of a Student Game: Game Overview

Our game is a FPS in space. Our designer from last semester made a great video giving the basics on the game. To save you a lot of reading I have embedded it below. Our team last semester consisted of one artist, one designer, one programmer, and one producer with a background in both business and design. This semester we have that same team with some new additions. We have two more artists, three more designers, and one more programmer. This makes our team 10 strong and we are happy with these numbers.



now that you know the basics, I'll go over how we got to that point.

Art:
When coming up with the game idea we wanted to avoid having to model and animate a person due to the time it would take to create it. With one artist to make the environment, characters, and everything else you see in the game. It wouldn't have been feasible to do this in the semester. So we decided to make it first person so you couldn't see the character, who is assumed to be human but never actually stated. We made the enemies swarms so that they could be represented by place holder particle effects. The designer and artist, who had worked in UDK before, knew that UDK could do amazing stuff with lighting and post-process volumes. This put points in UDK's corner for being picked as our base.

Design:
Our designer had a large amount of experience in UDK and knew a lot about how to use it. He would be able to use Kismet to help do smaller programming tasks, leaving me more time to work on the main chunks of code I needed to do. I liked the thought of that. He also knew how to work with the lighting in UDK and a lot of its other features.

Programming:
I was open to learning something new. I had done it the semester before in our Production II class where we made a smaller game in one semester. I picked up Unity and C# and liked that I was broadening my skill set. So when they proposed it I wasn't turned off by the idea. I also have an interest in working with AI programming. So our game was likely to have AI in it in some way or another.

We originally were considering Unity, UDK, and XNA. Then our game concept began to develop and as it did we went with UDK. Out unfolded what you saw in the video.

As we start this semester we still have a long way to go. As of the end of last semester our combat was missing something, we couldn't put our finger on it though. Our enemies needed a revamping graphically. The weapon was basically the stock UDK gun with only a few tweaks to it. I believe the Gun was the only asset in the vertical slice that wasn't done by Keith, our artist. While there was some concept art done up for it, we never started the model since it would take some time to complete and we had to populate the environments we were already doing. By the end of this semester we need to present a finished and polished game with at least 30 minutes of gameplay.

In the next post, Week 1, I will detail the results of the brainstorming sessions and work that we did this week.