Project Going for a ride :
Project Deadline
Gameplay movie
[In case you don't see the controls beneath the movie, double click on the movie. Click again to pause the movie.]
Process
The goal of the game was to create an experience through a digital ride. It had to be some
sort of virtual theme park attraction where the experience was more important than gameplay.
For the subject, we could choose from a course, a teacher or working member of USAT or the
study Game Design & Develeopment itself. We have chosen the study as subject for our
ride. The game should also be usable as promotion for the school.
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Documents
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Team 19
- me – Developer – Secondary : Game Designer
- Paul Suurmeijer – Project Lead – Secondary : Game Designer
- Peter van de Kuijt – Artist – Secondary : Game Designer
- Wouter van Dongen – Developer – Secondary : Artist
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Disneyland resort Paris
To kick-off this project, we went on a study trip to Disneyland Resort Paris. This was officially one big secret. But I already suspected the trip destination would be Disneyland. This project was a fun project and when it was made public in which hotel we would be staying, I knew it for sure.
This was a study trip, so it wasn’t a surprise we had to do assignments … First we had to do assignments in the city of Paris itself. Once in Disneyland, we were given some new tasks, but luckily, I know the theme park in and out.
According to the project itself, there hasn't been done much in this week next to the forming of the team.
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Game Concept
Concept drawing
When we decided we wanted to make the game about our education, we didn't want to put the school directly into the game.
Because our team consisted completely out of game designers, we came to a game idea pretty fast. We had the idea to create a game where everything goes wrong the closer you got to the goal. There would be chaos, but you would maintain to move forward. At this point, we didn't have any idea of where the game would take place, so we called the things that would come at you as entities instead of humans. You would have to dodge these entities or otherwise you would be pushed aside or even be knocked over.
Because the game had to be a ride, we decided you could not die in the game. You wouldn't be able to run back to where you started. At the end point of the game, you would be able to restart the ride.
The goal of the game would be half a sphere that emits light. This sphere had to look alien in the environment. It is the reason everything goes wrong and things are fleeing. But you are going straight to it. Your mission is to reach the sphere.
This story is a metaphor for the journey towards a deadline. The ride towards a deadline is never smooth, the closer you get to it, the more things seem to go wrong, etc.
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Inspiration
When we had pinned down our idea, we looked at some movies where chaos reigned. The most inspirational movie was Cloverfield. The main character in this film also goes towards the location where everything is going wrong while other people are fleeing.
For the game to have more impact, we used a First Person Perspective. Our main character would be a member of an obscure elite military organization, so he / she would have to be fit and would be using quick movements. This caused us to focus our intention on games like Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed.
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Story
In short : you are a member of an obscure military organization, named USAT. Our ride would be a training simulation that would not be happening under the normal circumstances.
For the full story, check out this doc.
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Location
Eventually we decided to let the game take place on the earth. The fleeing entities would be
humans.
To avoid the cliché disaster movie settings, we would let the game take place in The
Netherlands. We didn't have a specific city in mind, but we have based ourselves on the
typical mansion which can be found in large cities. For further details, we also used Dutch
architecture. The cars have Dutch license plates and of course, bikes are added.
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Ambitious
Originally everyone in our team wanted to do something he hadn't done before. When our first ideas were generated, we became a bit too cocky and wanted everything to look slick. Although we were allowed to use rendered 3D images in 2D, we went for a full 3D experience.
The consequence of this action was that everyone did tasks he was good in. So I ended up again as a programmer.
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Prototyping
This movie is a prototype film to get the general feel of what the game should feel like.
Movie edited by Peter.
[In case you don't see the controls beneath the movie, double click on the movie. Click again to pause the movie.]
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Many code, at first sight few results
Because of our ambitious and maybe even pretentious attitude, we would need a lot of code to make everything work. Luckily, we had 2 developers. We divided the programming into functional and graphic coding. Wouter would do the functional part while I would put my attention on the use of shaders.
To share our code easily amongst each other, we used SVN. So we had a central point we could reach from everywhere around the globe. This way of collaboration does require concentration, cause you can easily ruin something. Our problems where luckily never severe.
At a certain point, Wouter decided to create a 3ds Max plug-in to transform a scene in an
XML file which XNA could interpret to build a level. Although this looked pretty daunting,
Wouter succeeded in creating it.
I have written the parser to use the XML file inside XNA.
A ton of functionality was coded and worked inside our environment, but we could only use them once our street was finished. But the street was finished the day before the deadline … This resulted in the fact things like 3D audio, particles, normal mapping, reflection mapping, etc. are not in the game. But they were operational in our test environments.
Collision turned out to be problematic, so it is not present in the game. The collision with the houses is being faked by simply checking the location of the player.
The library we used for animation, had its own method for drawing models, causing the textures not to be drawn. After searching approximately half an hour, I discovered the problem. The solution for this issue would have been to rewrite a part of the library to have our shaders working correctly. But I didn’t wanted to alter a library. Libraries are supposed to work out of the box. Also, there were more important issues that required my attention.
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Audio
Music and sound effects are executed by 2 music students, namely Bart Delissen and Hessel van Hoorn. They provided the epic music for the game, did some voice acting and made the sound effects.
We were very disappointed we hadn't been able to use all of the audio in our game. They even recorded the day before the deadline a piece of audio we needed, but it hasn't made it into the ride anymore.
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Name of the game
It has taken a long time before we named our game.
Originally, I wanted ‘Silver Lining’ as a working title, based upon the saying ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’. But this seemed unclear to the other team members. So the working title became ‘the project’.
With the deadline closing in, we didn’t have many time anymore to come up with a nice title. At first, it seemed the name would become ‘USAT : Deadline’, but because of a last minute change, the game became ‘Project Deadline’.
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