TEAM DYNAMIC:We worked in a group of 6 and my roles in this team was primarily programming (blueprint)
However I was also responsible for some of the game design and level design although not entirely. (I also felt like I was sub-team manager).
For example, we had to design the level with fairly linear paths in mind because I did not have the time to figure out how to implement more complicated alien ai (and I did work constantly on this game only stopping to sleep, grab food or go to the toilet).
I suggested to the team that we use Slack as a tool for communicating and sharing assets after seeing Mike Bithel speak highly of it on twitter. It worked fantastically (except when it went down for a few hours). I feel confident using this new tool now and intend to use it on using it in any future collaborative projects.
Honestly I felt like 6 people was too many people as the first day was quite frustrating with everyone trying to speak at once. It took us a very long time to come up with a basic design and what we came up with had too many elements and little thought had gone into the core game loop or how the game would ctually work.
GAME DESIGN:
On day 2 I suggested that we simplify the design (game theorist and designer) Keith Bergun style and focus on building everything around a central mechanic; 'protect the core, protect yourself'.
The suit designs were changed to be more defensive and the suit locations were changed to entice the player away from the core for more risk/reward style of play.
However I know now from playtesting that they were too difficult to see. I would make change the purple suit too as it was uninteresting and underwhelming in its benefit to the player.
Another bad design decision was the complexity alone. An arcade game should be instantly readable, the player should know how to play just by looking at the game. Clearly this was not the case as the objective was vague and the suits were ambiguous. We had to stop every player before they played and tell them what to do. Bad design.
We did have some good design:
- placing the suits far from the core (despite them being hard to see)
- Therefor the player has to sacrifice the core for a while to go get them. Risk/Reward.
- Increasing the speed at which zombies were spawned in at a fairly quick rate (forces an endgame fairly quickly) Arcade games should be short, it's more addictive that way. See any successful ios game.
- However it still may be too slow and 1 life would have been better if not for the ambiguity of dying
- Combo system (more kills with each bomb = more points for each kill)
- Rewards efficient use of bombs and works in conjunction with the propellers which stall aliens and with the red suit which you can also use to stall (and group) aliens.
ART:
I made the aliens wiggle as they move to fake animation (and to help them get unstuck on walls)
The camera angle was chosen to reflect oldschool arcade games and the ui was designed to reflect this too
We wanted to make the suits distinct in colour because the player is very small relative to the screen size.
We extended this idea to make the whole level change colour and we gave the player a torch to make the direction you're looking clearer.
The top of the core changes colour if it's being attacked and the base of the core changes colour based on how much health it has. This was to make it visual without adding more UI elements.
AUDIO:
We extended this idea even further when we added music variations to the soundtrack. Again, this was done to make the game more readable as well as for aesthetic reasons.
So when the core is taking damage a warning sound starts playing in rhythm with the music.
When you equip the bubble (red) suit, a bouncy overlay plays along with the music and the alien suit has its own overlay too.
To make this work I just played all 4 tracks together at the start on loop and varied the volume for each accordingly.
Jack Douglas-Deane did all our audio and I consider it the most polished part of the game
JUICE:
We filled the game with bass, explosions, screenshake, destructible environments and particle effects. It worked well.
With more time I would have added permanence to alien death (blood splatters, rag-doll effects?) and added even more SFX to the soundscape.
CONCLUSION:
- Too many cooks
- Bad game design (over complicated)
- Good art but bad artistic direction (because it wasn't readable)
- Fantastic audio
- Working in a large team can be difficult to organize but the volume of work you can produce is increased
- Using Slack was helpful and I think using Skype would have benefited us also
- I think it would be useful to define peoples roles from the offset and stick to those roles
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