4Nature Case Study

For my second year of university, I and a group of classmates were tasked to create a group project what would be suitable as a portfolio piece.

Initial Plan

for this, my group decided on a 2d adventure puzzle game inspired by games such as The Legend of Zelda, The Binding of Isaac, and Secrets of Grindea. as this would be a great opportunity to show off each of our skills, with my role being the programmer and leader.

We started by creating a document that listed potential ideas for this game as we needed to present our idea first before fully developing it.

for the document we marked off the designs we believed would be relevant to the game and would be within our skills and could be produced before the deadline.

for the last part of the plan, we set out an excel table that lists what each member had to produce by different dates and made sure that each member had their input so that it was a reasonable time plan.

Development

For development, my role was the games programmer so I had to turn the concepts into functional pieces.

I started off by developing and testing the individual components in a testing room, then moved on to testing the objects that would be grouped together this gave me a good idea on whether all the concepts would be doable within the time frame.

after this insight, we changed how the air element based room would work as it would take a lot of development time to include 2.5D elements in this project.

When the levels had been designed I worked on implementing them and I got the member working on game design to help test the levels so I could get another viewpoint.

When working on the locked doors in the game I originally planned to use an integer to keep track of how many vents had been covered but I realised that the integer would have not been the clearest and could cause issues because of how much the variable would have needed a lot of checks to make sure it increases or decreases at the right amount and making sure it didn't go beyond limits. So to fix this I used booleans inside each of the vents to keep track of if each vent was open or closed and then made an array to store all the vent references and used a for loop to check through each one. This meant that the vents were only responsible for themselves following the single responsibility principle.

Another issue that cropped up late was that the sprites and visual assets were not developed on time based on the plan meaning that I told the Graphic designer to priorities the common and main sprites for the game because I saw that they were not going to produce all the work before the deadline.

Result

I was satisfied with my portion of the result with the game having all four dungeons originally planned completed and even extended past the originally planned size including extra features thought up during development such as the puzzles in the boss fight and the second portion of the water dungeon where the player dodges obstacles while riding the platform on the water.

What I learned from the project is that in future projects if I have the role of the leader I should put more pressure on team members to meet the deadlines and that I should get more people outside of the project to test the game for more effective feedback.