crunching
by abc · 03/07/2006 (11:22 am) · 0 comments
My game design class is coming to its close as I enter the final week of development and try to pull this thing together into presentable shape. The last two weeks have been hectic and it looks like the last one will be the most so....good luck self. I'd put up a picture but a lot of sites are being funky for me this evening, so image hosting is unavailable.
With very little debate, our team settled on a "cartoon adventure" idea to start off of. The rest of the design process was chiselling down....carving out the story, the "musts" and "shouldn'ts" of gameplay, the characters, and slowly getting down to individual pieces. We started out with some ambitious concepts and managed to preserve a bunch of them, but as time progressed I noticed how we more-or-less brushed away some of these concepts in favor of solving the nitty-gritty basics. At various stages of the design process we were all helpful...but it's in the implementation that I'm seeing the real differences.
For better or for worse I've done the vast majority of the implementation work because I have the largest skillset. I've worked with the "Game Maker" program and know most of its ideosyncracies already, so I did the gameplay coding. I composed every one of the 17 and counting BGM loops and made up the sound effects. I put together a working version of the entire first third of the game by myself. For this week I'm getting to a stage that I've been somewhat dreading for the whole project, as it is reliant on the rest of the team. One member has been doing paper level design and dialogue. The other has done sprites and made "could-work" mockups of levels using Game Maker's tools.
The dialogue is good. The paper levels seem OK. It's the sprites and the mockups that are going to give me an aneurysm because they clearly aren't up to the same standard that I set with what I already made. Take the main character, for starters. He follows a "smiley-face-with-limbs" character design, which I would think would be easy enough to get right, and yet, somehow, he manages to be MESSED UP. The problems are manyfold: An asymmetrical, unclean mouse outline, downsized from an enormous resolution to 32x32 and left uncleaned, with legs that are thin and set too far apart, hands too blocky and high, left UNANIMATED, and with the forward/backward and left/right versions made at DIFFERENT SCALES.
I started trying to fix it, and then finally decided to redo the character entirely. Keeping that sprite would have been embarassing - nobody would take it seriously. I gently hinted when I first saw it that it could do with a revision, but this appears to be the best I'll get.
Similarly, the level mockups are done in a style that can best be described as "Windows 3.1 gaming," built to a lilliputian scale and generally consisting of some border made from a repeated sprite, a seamless repeated texture for the background, and a bunch of sprite rips for objects inside the room. They're not ALL that bad, and a few of the sprites based on photos look fairly decent, but the only way I think I can manage to have some pride about the working set for these later areas is by thinking "this stuff comes later in the game! We can hook them at the start and then get away with this bullshit in the middle!"
Oh, and none of his resources are given names. The whole time he was showing them to us he was clicking haphazardly five or six times in a row to try to pull up the right room.
With respect to the final project, this is a terrible class to be "just a student taking it for credit" in. It's also a terrible class to be a "hardcore developer" in. The former gets pushed to do grunt work without any preparatory instruction and the results are predictably abysmal; meanwhile, the latter gets held back by the former.
With very little debate, our team settled on a "cartoon adventure" idea to start off of. The rest of the design process was chiselling down....carving out the story, the "musts" and "shouldn'ts" of gameplay, the characters, and slowly getting down to individual pieces. We started out with some ambitious concepts and managed to preserve a bunch of them, but as time progressed I noticed how we more-or-less brushed away some of these concepts in favor of solving the nitty-gritty basics. At various stages of the design process we were all helpful...but it's in the implementation that I'm seeing the real differences.
For better or for worse I've done the vast majority of the implementation work because I have the largest skillset. I've worked with the "Game Maker" program and know most of its ideosyncracies already, so I did the gameplay coding. I composed every one of the 17 and counting BGM loops and made up the sound effects. I put together a working version of the entire first third of the game by myself. For this week I'm getting to a stage that I've been somewhat dreading for the whole project, as it is reliant on the rest of the team. One member has been doing paper level design and dialogue. The other has done sprites and made "could-work" mockups of levels using Game Maker's tools.
The dialogue is good. The paper levels seem OK. It's the sprites and the mockups that are going to give me an aneurysm because they clearly aren't up to the same standard that I set with what I already made. Take the main character, for starters. He follows a "smiley-face-with-limbs" character design, which I would think would be easy enough to get right, and yet, somehow, he manages to be MESSED UP. The problems are manyfold: An asymmetrical, unclean mouse outline, downsized from an enormous resolution to 32x32 and left uncleaned, with legs that are thin and set too far apart, hands too blocky and high, left UNANIMATED, and with the forward/backward and left/right versions made at DIFFERENT SCALES.
I started trying to fix it, and then finally decided to redo the character entirely. Keeping that sprite would have been embarassing - nobody would take it seriously. I gently hinted when I first saw it that it could do with a revision, but this appears to be the best I'll get.
Similarly, the level mockups are done in a style that can best be described as "Windows 3.1 gaming," built to a lilliputian scale and generally consisting of some border made from a repeated sprite, a seamless repeated texture for the background, and a bunch of sprite rips for objects inside the room. They're not ALL that bad, and a few of the sprites based on photos look fairly decent, but the only way I think I can manage to have some pride about the working set for these later areas is by thinking "this stuff comes later in the game! We can hook them at the start and then get away with this bullshit in the middle!"
Oh, and none of his resources are given names. The whole time he was showing them to us he was clicking haphazardly five or six times in a row to try to pull up the right room.
With respect to the final project, this is a terrible class to be "just a student taking it for credit" in. It's also a terrible class to be a "hardcore developer" in. The former gets pushed to do grunt work without any preparatory instruction and the results are predictably abysmal; meanwhile, the latter gets held back by the former.
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