Project Here I am ! :
Beetle Bump
Beetle Bump - click to play the game - Silverlight required
Project
The goal of this project was to make a completely functioning game.
Officially, there were 3 constraints :
- the game had to work
- it had to be entertaining for at least 1 minute
- the game should be playable without an explanation from its creators
We defined a target audience for ourselves to have a better focus for our product. We had chosen the biggest group of casual gamers, namely women between 25 - 40 years old.
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Team
- me - Half project lead / Gameplay programmer / Game designer
- Mieke ten Dam - Artist
- Paul Suurmeijer - Other half project lead / Game design lead
- Wouter van Dongen - Tech programmer / Game designer
Audio by Bart Delissen & Hessel van Hoorn.
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Project I want you !
This project actually has been born from the ‘I want you !’ project we had
in the first week of the second semester (called Project Pitch in my log).
We had to come up with a game concept we could make completely playable during the period of
the ‘Here I am !’ project.
But we weren't sure if this game idea we came up with would eventually be executed. The
whole class was divided into teams of two people and only half the game ideas would be made
into a game.
I got together with Wouter and we thought up a simple concept for a casual game we could turn
into a working game. The movies below show the basic rules of the game :
We luckily were chosen by our fellow students and could create this game later this year.
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Technical switch
Originally, we wanted to create the game in Adobe Flash. But Wouter suggested to try out Microsoft Silverlight. He had created a game engine for XNA that could be ported to be used for Silverlight.
Both Wouter as I had ran into the limitations of Flash before, so we thought Silverlight could be better. How we were wrong … Wouter was going to take care of the technical programming and I would take care of the gameplay programming, so I haven't ran into the problems myself. But the fact was, that the whole render system performance differed from each computer. Wouter has done several changes to get the performance acceptable on different configured computers, but it took a long time.
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Art
We trusted our artist to completely work out the art without interference from the other
team members. The only thing we wanted, was that the objects you would send into the grid
system weren't balls.
Eventually, we did suggested some changes to the art because some things weren't
gameplay friendly.
Here are some work in progress images of the game :
Work in progress 1 - click to enlarge
Work in progress 2 - click to enlarge
Work in progress 3 - click to enlarge
Eventual art - click to enlarge
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Levels
With Mieke taking care of the art, Wouter and I of the programming, Paul had the task of creating levels and testing them with people. He eventually created 32 levels.
Because we wanted to have a way of easily adding and removing levels to the game, we decided to use XML for the levels. At first, Paul had to type levels straight into XML, but Wouter wanted to create a small editor so things would go faster. I have to admit I was not a fan of the idea because we hadn't planned time for this. But Wouter succeeded and Paul could create levels a lot faster now.
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Gameplay
The most important thing that changed during the making of the game, was the score system. At first, players would just earn score for each bump. But this was not very interesting to create a high score list with. We thought we could maybe use something like a multiplier that would go up by bumping beetles within a certain time limit.
But after Paul had tested this, it turned out people didn't like these systems. So our current score system got born and made things a lot more interesting. At the top of the screen, you have empty colored hearts which show in which order you should bump the beetles. If you can play them in that order, you would have a maximum score on the level. If not, you can finish the level, but with a lesser score.
We first had a difficulty curve with levels divided into tutorial, easy, normal, etc. But as the score system changed, we also felt this division wasn't interesting anymore. We adapted it so you would now have a series of levels. High scores would count for an entire series, not per level. The sum of all scores achieved in each level of a specific series would be the players high score for that series.
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Presentation
On the day of the presentation, in the morning were the presentations and in the afternoon, we had to put our games on display in our lab so people could play it.
I was really surprised to find out some people actually played our game for an entire hour ! 1 minute entertaining ? Definitely ! We had set up three laptops, so we didn't have problems with computer hoggers :)
Now that's what I like to see my games achieve : having people playing it for a decent amount of time and enjoying the whole process.
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Final product
Go check out the game yourself now !
Beetle Bump - click to play the game - Silverlight required
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