Camelot Galway... a developers journal.

Well I am happy to finally say that Camelot Galway is available at the garagegames store, But since this is a site that is dedicated to developers this .plan will focus on the game from a developers perspective.

Camelot Galway was actually developed on Torque 1.2 and has had a fun time riding the development rollercoaster's ups and downs :P. There were down times, changes between teams, and of coarse some bugs sprinkled here and there causing unwelcome delays but no matter the hardships the development pushed on and the learning experiences were well worth it.


Size is an Issue

This is an older image to give an idea of the massive size of the mission.

One of the first major issues that had to be resolved was introduced with the changes in teams. The game content began to grow out of control with duplicates here and there and other confusions along with loss of source files for models. At its largest the game was a very hefty 400MB! Knowing our goal was to get the game under 100MB several steps were taken to reduce its size.

First the content was searched for all the duplicates and the scripts were corrected to point to the new file locations. The lesson here was that the folder structure needs to be planned well in advance and rules should be applied for all the members of the team to agree on.

Secondly all of the image files were checked and either reduced in size, cleaned, or compressed. Programs like Photoshop and many other editors will place in comments and other redundant information within the jpg or png files. Cleaning programs are widely available online and in our case helped reduce the size of many images without compromising the image quality. Compression programs are also fairly common and will usually reduce the file size a lot more but may affect the visual quality of the image.

After all the merging, deleting, resizing, cleaning, and compression of files the game was reduced to a much more reasonable 53MB :D.

Squashing Some Bugs

This shot shows the cartoon style of Camelot Galway. Note the shadows drawn on the ground under the buildings.

Nothing is more stressful then a bad bug maybe that is why the main goal of Centipede is to blast the suckers into oblivion :). As projects go Camelot Galway showed us its fair share of pesky critters.

One Issue that wasn't really as much of a bug as a general annoyance was extremely long load times. The entire game of Camelot Galway takes place in one massive jam packed mission file. With the number of Diff, dts, and image files in place the load times and mission lighting phase was so long I could watch a sitcom, eat dinner, take a small vacation at the beach and come back to see the progress bar just nearing the finish :P.

There were a few solutions to this problem that we discussed, one of which was to break the game into smaller mission files. We decided against this approach because we wanted to keep the player in the world and not have a load bar every time you came to a specific street. The other option was to remove the lighting phase all together. This solution at first sounded a little drastic especially to the artists involved with the project :P. However, the look and feel of Galway was always meant to be bright colorful and almost cartoony. With this in mind we decided to take out the lighting phase and draw our own shadows on the ground as that was the main place that the shadows needed to be to keep an esthetic look.

No More Delays

I'm fine now thanks for asking.

Time zones, school, holidays, sickness and a multitude of other factors can postpone a project for several days if not weeks in some cases. During the development cycle of Camelot Galway all of the above in one way or another affected the time frame of Milestone completion. This issue, however, doesn't exactly have a concrete solution. It does however stress the importance of good planning and time management. A project plan should always be able to factor in for uncertainty.

From Work to Game Play

This shot demonstrates interacting with people in exploration mode. looks like its about to rain better get moving.

There are two main modes of play in Camelot Galway, exploration mode and navigation mode. When you right click the mouse you will change between the modes allowing you to interact with the world in exploration mode (when the cursor is up) and look around with the mouse for easier navigation in navigation mode (no cursor :P).

In exploration mode you can talk with people, view postcard information about shops, purchase pages with coins you collect around the world, learn some English to Irish conversions for objects in the world, and discover the mini games to help you on your way to collecting all the pages of the ancient stories of Galway.

Exploring the world of Galway and finding all of the pages can take some time so you can save your progress at any time in the game by pressing the 'n' key and later loading the game file you saved. There is also a map that you can pop up at any time with the 'm' key to view your current position in the world. And of coarse pressing 'b' will open up the book display to show you how many pages you have collected and you can read through the stories at any time.

You can find out more info at www.camelotgalway.com.

That about wraps it up for this .plan and in many ways for me, Camelot Galway :D.
I hope to see many more projects to completion within our team and throughout the rest of the GarageGames community.