I learned a lot from working on this project and chose CryEngine as that's what I found challenging. It was however very taxing towards the end as the documentation for the engine was very vague and I had to spend lots of time on the CryEngine forums discussing my issues, also contacting people who made YouTube tutorials and getting as much information as I could. But at the end of the day I learned a lot more than I would have if I had chosen an engine I was already comfortable with. CryEngine is a very different beast altogether and among understanding the C++ code and editing it to work the way I wanted it, working with it's inbuilt visual scripting and even working on flash to implement intro videos and the HUD in scaleform, I must say felt all the more rewarding when I finally completed this project and received a lot of appreciation from my faculty and the jury from Wales.
This has to be one of the most challenging project I have undertaken till date. This game was submitted as my final year project at college and was completed with a team of 2, my friend was responsible for all the art and design and I handled all the programming. It is a 3D Third Person Shooter which focuses on different game play styles and survival. This game takes place in a futuristic world and this first level is set in a city above sea, with transparent roads that showcase the gorgeous water effects of CryEngine. In this world, time is an entity that you can absorb and use to live longer. This is why the game utilizes a time system instead of the traditional health points. The character slowly loses time points every second and can find time pickups scattered across the level. Even if the character loses all their shields to damage they still won't die and instead begin to take time damage, once time falls to 0 then the character dies and the level has to be restarted. There are also traps and other objects that directly leech of your time points, the player has to be careful and avoid these as much as possible. The objective of this game is to reach the office building on the other side of the map without dying. The game also allows the player to chose between two styles of game play right after the tutorial. Walking into the blue marker will activate the stealth mode and will give the player silenced bullets and the ability to be less prone to detection in shadows. Walking into the red marker will activate destruction mode and give the player incendiary bullets for their guns, which explode on contact and can send enemies flying. The rest of the level can be explored freely as long as the player can keep their time points up and doesn't attract too much attention from the enemies. I learned a lot from working on this project and chose CryEngine as that's what I found challenging. It was however very taxing towards the end as the documentation for the engine was very vague and I had to spend lots of time on the CryEngine forums discussing my issues, also contacting people who made YouTube tutorials and getting as much information as I could. But at the end of the day I learned a lot more than I would have if I had chosen an engine I was already comfortable with. CryEngine is a very different beast altogether and among understanding the C++ code and editing it to work the way I wanted it, working with it's inbuilt visual scripting and even working on flash to implement intro videos and the HUD in scaleform, I must say felt all the more rewarding when I finally completed this project and received a lot of appreciation from my faculty and the jury from Wales.
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This game is inspired by the slot machine games that you would find in casinos across the world. The mechanics of this game are tweaked and slightly more in depth and skill based in comparison to the traditional slot machines in order to keep players more interested and engrossed. This is also the reason there are various mechanics like the option to move a reel up or down one position after every spin which in turn allows the players to win more often and feel rewarded which in turn keeps them playing. The objective of the game is to get a touchdown, the progress towards a touchdown is shown in the bar on the left side of the machine. You can only add points to the touchdown bar when you're in offense mode (green light on the top of the machine) and you have a set number of turns before you will go into defense mode. During defense mode you will have a different scoring system of which you can view by clicking on the red light. The objective here is to either score 100 points or keep playing until you go back into offense mode. There is a reel selection mechanism that requires you to select one column after every spin using left or right directional arrow keys and then pressing up or down to move that reel in that direction in order to score better. I have implemented an experimental in game shop system that shows a popup when the player runs out of credits, the player can then select how much credits they want to recharge for and can continue playing. This is meant to function similarly to Facebook or other online games that have an in game market you can buy items from to continue playing. This was one of the most memorable and fruitful experiences I had making games. We learned to work as a team and for the first time, I had to share programming work with someone else. It was for the Global Game Jam 2013 and we were competing on a global scale. Bangalore based game studio Dhruva International hosted the event at our city and we had teams from a ton of companies, colleges and even schools come in and participate. We gained a lot of exposure and learned a lot from the more experienced developers. The game had to be created within a time span of 48 hours and we were a team of 5 people, 2 of us were programmers and the remaining worked on art and design. Now down to the game itself, it is a 2D multiplayer survival game with different objectives for each player. Player 1 has to collect 4 colored pills in a set order to win the game. Player 2 has to try to catch player 1 or stay near them for 4 seconds in order to win. Player 2 also has access to portals in the map to help them catch the other player. We learned a lot during these 48 hours, we had no idea how to work as a team or even how to share programming work but a couple of YouTube tutorials later we were well on our way. This project was both fun and equally challenging to complete. We were a team of 2 programmers and 2 designers and we literally lived in college for the last few days untill the deadline of this project. We experienced the famous "crunch" time or in other words the extremely fast paced atmosphere that gets tenser as the deadline approaches. There were a lot of snags and a lot of last minute decisions had to be made. But we pulled through, and it made us stronger as a team and we learnt a lot in the process. I cant wait to do it again! I had my sights on using a game engine for a long time and finally that time had come. The objective of this assignment was to use the techniques and logic learnt to create a 3D game. Having learnt JavaScript during high school, using Unity was a lot of fun and I picked up soon. I wanted to challenge myself this time and tried something that needed a lot of coding and understanding of logic. What can i say? Endless score based games were extremely popular. I decided to attempt to make one in 3D this time using the techniques I learnt from my previous project. I had a lot of fun creating this one. Especially because for the first time, my friends in the game department and me had to coordinate to get this one done. We ended up teaching each other a lot in the process and it was very insightful. After getting comfortable with the game development process, it was time to try creating a game in J2ME, this project had to be done individually and now that I had developed a sound logic and was comfortable with coding, I decided to go wild and try something to complement my Indian Heritage, Yes! that fat man with a basket is catching famous Indian sweet delicacies, and there's a cow in the background. Oh, and you have to make sure his grandparents don't catch him. Everything about this game was fun and I found myself laughing in the late hours of the night watching everything come to life as I coded. This project was very interesting. AI was something that always intrigued me. To get a chance to finally work on it was exciting. I finally gained insight into this topic and learnt a lot about it and fulfilled the objective of the assignment. This project required XNA to be used again, but this time incorporating physics elements into the game. I had a lot of experimenting with the Farseer physics engine and I decided to challenge myself by trying to simulate the gravity on the moon. This entire project was done by me and watching the game in action was very rewarding.
After learning the basics of C++ and having a clearer insight into the game development process, I started work on a 2D game using C++ and DirectX, the entire game was made by me and was a lot of fun, especially coding the level to repeat itself and thus making the game endless. |
AuthorSelf proclaimed world's best programmer reporting for duty. Just kidding, my passion is to create amazing experiences for gamers all over the world by leveraging my ability to work in fast-paced environments with accuracy and speed. Using the techniques and skills learnt in the duration of my course along with my experience developing games. Categories
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