Danny Moffatt's Blogging in Heaven |
So I recently brought my prototype of Demented to 1GAM here in Dublin. It has been quite some time since I've shown any new work off but I was delighted with the response it got. People were even coming back for seconds to try to keep the high score. I've made a quick video below which shows what stage the game was at when I brought it. I will be bringing more content for the game including design documents and dev demos but for now enjoy the gameplay footage.
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My three years in college learning how to be a better game designer is coming to an end. I have met some interesting people and made some lifelong friends along the way. I would never have gotten this far without the help of my fellow classmates and the encouragement of the Irish Game Dev community. This is an abridged version of my three years of studying computer games development and the journey from Pong to whatever I imagine. I started on this journey knowing that I already had some skills that would be a big advantage for me going into game development. I had learned to code years before as well as written screenplays for film and studied film and sound. I decided before I even started in college that game development was now my career and I had to work hard at college to become the best. Nothing much of note came out of my first semester. I made a one player battleships game, a rock star themed deck building card game and a branching story about a night out. Although the last one I made in a twine jam, I was starting to ease into the community of game developers outside of college. Semester two started to get a little more interesting. A pretty simple PONG clone and Asteroids clone helped me learn the systems I needed to always program and how important game loops are to think of. Our team project for the semester used the *shivers* GameSalad Engine, with which my team managed to make a pretty decent clone of Joust. That summer I worked on my first Unity game. Deep Space Viking. It was also my first attempt at local multiplayer. It was an exciting project to work on at the time. I had much to learn and in a small amount of time. Paul worked on the art and sound as I figured out how to get the game running. Menu systems were the worst part as Unity 4.3 had not come out with the new UI system yet. It tested well in the dubLudos and 1GAMs we brought it to. Our first taste of players really enjoying something I'd worked on gave me a serious confidence boost and a level 7 degree with distinction. Something I would need heading into level 8...
Droid Rage was a game I developed in my final year and almost became my final year project. It was a 3D twin stick shooter which I thought was sought after. Just after starting development a similar game to what I had imagined came out (Assault Android Cactus) and I lost some motivation to finishing it to a polished marketable product.
It was fun to develop and I spent many hours shooting little robots and watching them explode. I learned a lot about handling lots of objects and spawning systems. The AI I implemented was very basic. I used path finding built into Unity and had them go to the player. We didn't implement multiplayer as we only spent a semester making the game but I did have the AI choose a player to attack and then changed to a spawner for each player so they didn't have to choose anymore. The lads working on the animation/art/audio did a lot to give it a nice look. I implemented all systems that would make it work. Menus/AI/Gameplay/GameManagers ect. |
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March 2016
AuthorDanny Moffatt |