My game development pipeline
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The document describes the ideation and development process for a video game called "First Impact". It discusses how the team came up with the idea of an alien escaping from government captors across various levels. It then outlines the pre-production work, including initial designs and programming. During production, the team programmed gameplay elements and debugged the first level, adding complexity based on testing feedback before developing the second level.
My game development pipeline
- 1. Ideation: The idea for first impact was born out of a series of discussion, we talked about our target audience and our game was to be aimed at children. As we were aiming at children we talked about what computer games we liked and played as children. We all loved playing the donkey kong/Mario bros., run around the world until you reach your goal, type of game. To decide what the story should be it was suggested to us that we talk about anything and not even in a way so that we focus on making a story. Our conversation was in the sci-‐fi area for a forgotten reason and it moved onto the subject of the movie ‘Paul’, it an instant I remembered the game ‘alien humanoid’. So I suggested the alien crash landing and the FBI capturing him only to have to chase him when he escapes, which is a twist on the plot of the ‘alien humanoid’ game. The idea of the levels even game in this conversation as we built the story of ‘Jeremy the alien’ escaping area 51 to the hillside where his ship is still crash, escaping he heads into space but is followed by an FBI/NASA shuttle. Pre-production While Will the project leader and Sam M the lead programmer made a alpha version of our game so that the basic code was already written for the later versions, I began designing. The first thing I designed (as lead art designer) was a ‘game in a frame’ cover the cover was as all old arcade game covers were elaborate and a completely different thing to the actual game. My game in a frame showed the FBI like an army, surrounding this crashed alien and his ship. I started the designs for Jeremy first using aliens from films and TV programmes; I ended up combing Gizmo from the gremlin film series and Stitch from Lelo & Stitch I threw in a little adaptation so the parts of the two combined onto my base model. The design of Jeremy was done with two colour variations, yellow and blue, the blue proved to be more popular. I also designed various versions of the FBI with square Minecraft styles and
- 2. then a hand drawn style, I then had the team pick a favourite suit colour; black, blue or grey. The collectable items were easy enough to do a file document for level one, a sheep for level two and my personal favourite collectable the unused level three shattered ship part with glowing orange energy stripes. There was also the designing of the laser traps used in level one I had several different shapes and then got the idea to include a warning sign for those who didn’t read the rules. The warning sign was the best out of the lot and was chosen by the team for the game. Sam M stepped away from the programming for a while and designed the buttons we would use for our menus, while I started designing the level backgrounds, floors, walls and ladders as well their placement in the levels of the game which Will and Sam M could use if they didn’t have a better idea for our level maze. Production: The production of the game was done by Sam M and Will the programmers of the team. They programmed the FBI to shot their guns on a regular bases, or to pace their area in search of Jeremy and to have the laser traps work in two separate functions. Sam M and Will began to build level 1, level 1 was a lot more simple at the beginning and after testing the level we had decided it was too easy, and added another guard, an automatic laser trap, and increased the speed of the guard’s bullet. The process of making the game was the hardest and longest part, we spent many weeks battling frustrating bugs to get the level working (once we had these fixed, creating level 2 was a lot easier, and only took just over a week). Along the way, we added and removed many elements of the game, such as the death sound effect, after a while we decided that the noise was too annoying, so we removed it, after complaints from
- 3. the Beta Testing, we also turned down the volume of the laser sound effect. At one point we also had no main menu or loading screens, so I designed an animated menu showing the spaceship crash & Sam M designed buttons and Will made a soundtrack for it. Post-Production: After the game was built we collected our sound effects and composed some music for the levels. Will and Sam M had left the in slots in the programming for us to add sound effects and music easily. While I composed the soundtrack for level two, which was happy suited for the outdoors aspect of the level and slightly irritating to make the player get angry in love with the game. I wrote the song using Garageband on my iPad using the sound presets and the instrument in the app. Whilst I was composing level two’s soundtrack Will was composing level one’s soundtrack in Garageband, Will made a sci-‐fi fast paced soundtrack which fit the level’s atmosphere perfectly. Will then went online to freesounds.org and found the sound for the lasers, the guns and the sound for collecting level two’s collectable. While Will collected those sounds I made the sounds for the character’s death and the sound for collecting level one’s collectable. Postmortem: There are several aspects to our game that could be improved. For instance the ladders caused an issue with how the game should work, the game has it’s own gravity pull the player down to the ground however when on a ladder he should be able to sit there without gravity pulling him down, making the only way down to fall off the side or press the ‘S’ key and climb down. Another bug with the ladders is that its ability to move Jeremy up the ladders when ‘W’ is pressed stretches past its borders, on level two this apparent more as the ladders are taller. The floor on level two also has a reach that goes past it’s borders and leaves Jeremy floating in the air until the end of that reach. Jeremy
- 4. can also deify gravity for a short time if he continuously runs and keeps running when you expect him to fall he does fall he just runs in mid air. I do regret not being able to include level three, as the collectable I designed was very cool, I also feel that my designed placement of level one was better then what we used but it was designed too late unfortunately.