SacrifumbleThe last course this semester I have not yet talked about is "game projects". In this course we get put in groups of 4-5 people split in to artists and programmers and are given the task of developing a small party game over the course of the semester. This course is meant to teach us teamworking skills and everything that comes with the process of developing a game with a team. We are learning to use source control platforms like perforce and distribute tasks in hack & plan. Apart from this though, the other piece of software we have to learn is the engine we are working in. At the start of the semester we were given the choice between Unity and UE4 as the engine we would be developing our game in. I opted to use Unity but since the rest of my team preferred Unreal and I wasn't gonna try and hold back the team by bitching about it we chose to go with the Unreal Engine in the end. The learning curve has been steep especially for the programmers since we have never properly worked in either engine for programming tasks. Luckily we didn't have to start off with the C++ scripts while this would probably be the better way to harness all the skills we already have in the language but since we had to start from absolute 0 with UE4 we chose to go with blueprints to make learning more gradual (gotta be able to walk before you start running). The first few weeks we spent a lot of time looking up tutorials, reading through forums and doing whatever we can to match our skills up with that of the artists as fast and as good as we could. Right now I already feel very comfortable using the UE4 engine, I obviously can't speak for my colleague but his work has been really good so I have no doubt in my mind we grew a lot. Our game is called Sacrifumble its a 2.5D platformer set in an ancient Aztec aesthetic. Players control little priests that are trying to climb a tower as fast as possible to be the first one to make an offer to a god on to. But one of the players is controlling a demon that will do everything in it's power to prevent this from happening. The demon or "overlord" character can activate traps or rotate pieces of the tower to reveal other sections with new obstacles for the priests to tackle. If the overlord manages to kill one of the priest he is freed and he now controls the priest he just killed to have a chance himself at making the first offer on top of the tower. The other player that just died has now become the overlord and it is now their task to try and kill another priest to again switch places. Despite the rather rough development cycle so far I am really happy with the progress we are making so far and so are our teacher who give us weekly feedback on both our game and the state of our teamwork. But I am still kind of sad I now don't really have the time to put the same effort into learning Unity since I believe that this is something ill have to be able to do before my studies are done, ill probably spend time on it during the holiday after this year.
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AuthorFlorian Gaeremynck Archive
June 2019
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