Blog #6 – First game project
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This is the first time I’ve ever finished a game project, let alone any project of this magnitude. Working on this project for the last couple of months has had its ups and downs.
Our game is a top down shooter with the main character, Brad, running through a very long church aisle. He is chased by the bride throughout the whole level and if she reaches you, it is game over. The player can’t shoot the bride, the only way to stop her is to pick up a holy grenade and blast her with its light, but even then she only stops briefly. On the way to the end of the aisle, wedding guest try to stop Brad in his path by either hitting him with their sharp claws or shooting him with a disgusting goo. There is also other hazards, like fire that puts you on fire or holes you can fall down.
If the player manages to reach the end door of the church, Brad wakes up next to his boyfriend and realize it was all a nightmare. Brad is gay, and in the nightmare he was marrying a bride he didn’t love, standing at the altar about to get married. He feels regret and starts running. All while the bride and the rest of the church turns into a hellish landscape, and tries to chase him down. We show this narrative through an animatic styled cutscene in the beginning of the game.
The art direction of the game tries to create a hellish looking place with a lot of red and dark colours and low exposure. We tried to create a theme that would tense the player up and thereby adding to the amount of stress s/he was feeling. It turned out to be a tense, stressful experience where it feels like the bride would catch up the moment you stopped moving. This was the aesthetic we were trying to reach, and I’m glad we managed to achieve that. I’m really happy that our group managed to finish “You may kiss the bride”. But am I as fond of our means to reach it or my own efforts as a group member? Maybe not as much. After working with the agile workflow I have realized it’s a much tougher task than expected and that people don’t have the same idea how they would like to use it, at least in this particular project. While some of our group members felt like we should follow the concept document more strictly others thought we were more or less free to do whatever we wanted, just using the concept document as a start. I was the latter, and when the conflicts of different approaches arrived, I was always a little frustrated with the result. Usually we ended up opting for the ideas that made little change compared to the concept document, which ultimately lead to a process more similar to waterfall production. For future reference I realized it would probably be a good idea to talk things like this through before heading into the project and of course also as you go. Why I’m not quite satisfied with my own performance stems in many different areas, one of them certainly being productivity. I don’t think I was being lazy during the project but still I didn’t manage to get as much done as I’d liked. I have always had difficulties working on my own, especially if I’m at home, and this project was no different. Towards the end our group was working together on Wednesdays and I think that helped a little, but it was still only one day per week. Getting the motivation was really hard and even when I started working animating is very hard and creating the animations took a long time. So the amounts of animations per week was at best two, and it made me feel like I couldn’t contribute to the Agile iterations as there was always animations needed to be done. Another part that was my mistake had to do more with personality rather than performance. I have problems formulating my thoughts into words, so when I disagree with decisions the group is making, I cannot express myself properly. And after finally figuring out how to say what I wanted to – the project is practically over. This will be something I have to drastically improve, as I consider disagreements just as important as agreements in a group. Members of a group should be able to express themselves openly if they want to work well together. Aside from the self insight, I have gotten a lot better at the programs I’ve used during the project. From drawing in Photoshop to getting used to the timeline and easily transporting animations and kinda importing them into Unity (the last part I’m not so good at yet!). But also the sound and video editing tool Sony Vegas and the sound tool Audacity I’ve gotten much more familiar with. I no longer drown in the mass of tools those programs have, which is nice.
Something I am, to my surprise, is being very content with is the sound design. It is so hard to know while working with the sounds how it’s going to feel in the end product. But seeing the final product it feels like the sound made sense in the context of our world. I wish I could add a video of the game here, but WordPress doesn’t work that way unless you pay for it. I made about a third of the sounds myself. Most of them were just searching online, which was a lot less interesting than recording your own noises, but together with some editing they could still lead to unique and cool sound effects. There were some minor issues in the coherency, but not to the point where it started bothering the player. This has been more of a self reflection than concrete examples from the game, but I hope you can take something away from it anyway! Onto the next project with a fresh mind and new ambitions!  |
