Project Design For Space :
To The Surface
Videos can be found at the bottom of this page. Don't want to read all the text ? Then click on this to jump to the videos.
Project
We needed to create a 3D game that has a minimum of 3 gameplay challenges which where space related. (note: space as environment, not the big black thing)
Team
- me - Program lead / Concept artist
- Paul Suurmeijer - Project Lead / 2D artist
- Gerard Bossebroek - 3D artist / Game designer
- Dennis Haverhals - Design Lead / Programmer
Eventually, everyone has contributed to the game design.
Music and sound effects by Hessel van Hoorn.
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Docs
Project document (Dutch) [pdf]Programming Classes [pdf]
Visual research (Dutch) [pdf]
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Start
To get some decent game ideas, we decided we all had to think out three ideas. We made a list of them and filtered out the three best ones. They were only ruff ideas and more of themes which we would use to create a more solid game idea from. These were in descending order : ‘trapped house’, ‘survival’ and ‘strategy game with level editing’.
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Trapped house
For the trapped house idea, I challenged myself to figure out a way to have a game that wasn't played inside a house, but outdoors. I soon came to the idea that you can create a trapped house feeling outside by using fog. In the same week I came up with this, it just happened that there was a fog Sunday morning. I grabbed my bike and just drove around until I came across a pond. Straight through this pond was a walkway. Then it hit me : this was the ideal way to create a trapped house idea in the outdoors. If you had a main character that couldn't swim, that character would be trapped in this place. The fog would create a claustrophobic feeling. This idea ended up to be our main game idea.
Atmospheric photo of the pond - click to enlarge
Moodboard for this concept - click to enlarge
Level idea sketch - click to enlarge
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Back to the drawing board
Just when we had our main idea and we wanted to go move on with the project, we heard we had to have to two other ideas. The teachers who guided the project would chose which idea we would have to actually create. This meant al of the sudden a giant brick wall appeared on our path which would only disappear if we knew which game idea we would eventually have to create. Our progression froze and we had to create two more game ideas. We took the other two top three concepts we already had and tried to create ideas for them.
Gerard came up with an interesting idea based upon a floating city which appeared in Tolkien's The Hobbit. Then, something magical happened. The boundaries off who came up with what idea blurred. In some strange flow, we all contributed ideas to this concept. The concept was born out off all of us and wasn't one guy's idea anymore. We all liked this concept better than all the other concepts we had, so we rooted this concept would be chosen as the game we would produce.
When judgment day arrived, this new concept was chosen.
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Writer's block - Concept art
Because we had a stop in the flow of the creation process, I became lazy. I just couldn't get myself to produce things. In our holiday week, I was going to create the concept art for the game. But because of my laziness, it never happened. Because I was so pissed off at myself, I forced myself into a workflow. Each day, I would create one building. This would take me one week. Luckily, I succeeded in creating them within that time. The following Monday, I gave myself the final push. I wanted to create an overview sketch of our game, so you would see how the game would more or less look like in the end. I forced myself to keep on going until the sketch was finished, which eventually was at 4.00 a.m. I was tired, but proud of myself I succeeded. It worked to ignite my working spirit again.
We were given the advice to keep the graphic style simple. So by starting to design the turbine, I got the idea to have a different basic geometrical shape as a base for each building.
Overview of all the sketches for the buildings - click to enlarge
Overview of the concept art for the buildings - click to enlarge
The sketch I pushed myself to create - click to enlarge
The resource and some colors differ from my ideas because someone else took care of the final visuals.
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Coding delay
Maybe it was a good thing I got myself into the working spirit again, but there was no denying our work scheme had taken a serious beating. The week I produced the concept art, we were supposed to start programming. Although I didn't really wanted to program, I had the role of program lead. I intentionally wanted to supervise the person who would program and would only program stuff that was a bit more trickier. But because we had the delay, I was forced to code more stuff.
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Coding Monkey (again)
Dennis and I were the programmers. Because Dennis didn't have much experience with object oriented programming, he asked me to program together. This was a new experience for me. Normally, I write code by myself.
The advantage of this method was that two minds can find a solution to a problem faster than one mind because every human has another way of thinking.
The disadvantage of this method is that I think you don't actually go a lot faster. You find solutions to problems faster, but you have two people on one piece of code. If everyone would do his or her own coding, the problems which could occur can take a longer time to be solved, but there is being two times more code produced. I don’t know if it's really a disadvantage. It's more a fact that putting two people on one piece of code or putting each person on another piece of code eventually produces the same amount of code.
When we got closer and closer to the deadline, we divided the programming tasks more and more to get more things working. Some of them didn't work very well, but at least the idea was present :)
I did find out I’m getting a sense of how long something would take to program. Most predictions I made about what we could program each day have been correct.
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Deadline approaching
We were on a steady course to produce a playable version of our game. It would not be finished, I foresaw that already, but at least it would be somewhat playable.
But then, disaster struck. Dennis wasn't able anymore to work the last two days of the project. Because of personal reasons. So I was again the one who was responsible to produce something that was convincing enough. Sadly, because I was the only programmer, I knew I wasn't able to finish it like I first thought it would be. I did my best, some functions weren't available, but they weren’t necessary to show the concept of the game.
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Presentation
On the day of the presentation, we quickly had to record some gameplay movies to show our game during the presentation. But for some unknown reason, the recording program only wanted to take input from the microphone, so all the sounds weren’t recorded. Because we had little time left, we put the music and background noise on the movie with Premiere. We weren't able anymore to put the sound effects in it.
When the presentation took place, there was a technical problem with the sound, resulting in movies without
sound.
The next day, it appeared the ‘technical problem’ was a fault of the presenter : the sound of his
laptop was muted when he presented the game …
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Result
So here's the result of how far we have come. Things could be better, but maybe someday, I'll pick it up again.
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