This is the first collected part of the chronicle of my attempt at trying to make my first large-scale video game. By large scale, I mean a project that is more than just two or three people messing around in their spare time in Director or Flash; this project would be something that would actually have positions like “Lead Artist”, “Lead Coder” and “Leader Interface Designer” as well as people under them to actually lead. I knew this was something I wanted to and needed to do before I graduated so that I would be able to show I had the ability to guide a large project from birth to a finished publishable version.

The disparate elements of this project started to come together last spring through the formation of the Savannah College of Art and Design’s student interactive and game design organization, Thirteen Thirty-Seven. As one of the founders of the club and its acting president, I had the ears of many talented students as well as the faculty of the school. I started to express my desire to get a project together for next year’s IndieGames Competition at the GDC. I felt that as an art school we would have a decided edge over any competing groups provided we could come up with a strong basic play design. I felt this because as artists we would be able to wrap our game in a much more elaborate and refined aesthetic than the previous student submissions had been able to muster. It turned out that the faculty wanted to have work from the college in that competition as well. The head of the department offered to reword the description of a class on the books so it would encompass the project. The first idea of the project was to pick a board game design from one of the Intro to Game Design classes and adapt it through either Flash or Director for multiplayer online play and have that be our submission.

During the first planning meeting the project leads and a few interested students were going over the various board game submissions and discussing the pros and cons of each of these games and how they could be produced. While this was going on, I started to explore the previous work of a student who would eventually become the lead coder. In that student’s work, I found a Flash project where he had programmed a set of spheres to move and rotate in 3D space. Immediately what I was looking at on the screen reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics and other tactical RPG and strategy games I loved playing. Inside of my brain, a most horrible and beautiful idea began to brew.

Why could we not do a game like that, tactical unit based strategy game inside of Flash? I blurted this out almost to myself, and the room went dead quiet. I am not sure if it was because everyone was mulling over what I had said or if I had just scared everyone by blurting out like that. After a few minutes of explaining in detail what I meant by that, the programmer simply said it would be easy to do something like that. And we were off.

We plotted out the basic concept for the game by having everyone involved suggest a theme for the game and a character race. We gathered at my apartment to go over everyone’s ideas. Immediately we were able to classify the ideas into two groups: the “Fantasy” group and the “Anything-But-Fantasy” group. We ended up combing the best elements of each person’s ideas into hybrid races that I felt are fairly original. The ideas for the initial three races were as follows:

The First Race

The first is a race of naturalistic beings that merge with an element upon their entrance into adulthood. They would take up the distinctive qualities of that element when this happens, even if that means that they lose part of their physical body. They would be the balancing force in opposition to the other two races that had come to exploit them and their world. They would act as the mid range race upon which the stats of the other two races could be built.

The Second Race

The second one was a race of aliens who existed in a world that was the complete opposite of ours. Instead of being lovers of things green and natural, they would be a race who thrived on things we consider toxins. Pollutants would be like fresh air to them and clear air toxic and deadly. They would be out on a mission to colonize the galaxy, much in the same way we would if we had their technology. And, much like we would, if they came to a planet they liked…they would terraform it. Except in this case their version of terraforming would be to pump the atmosphere full of toxic gas.To them their actions would not be malicious, but just a simply them doing what had to be done. Interestingly enough, this was the first group we actually named. The Malebana.

The Third Race

The final group was a combination of a psychically powerful race with one team member’s fervor for the undead. The two were easy to combine; after all what has almost no brainpower and therefore almost no resistance to psychic influence? Zombies! The concept was that this race was a society where the corporate machine had gotten out of control to the point where their employees were not longer see as separate entities, but instead as assets of the business. The undead that they utilize are not traditional undead, but rather cybernetically enhanced vat grown humans that have no fear or concept of pain. The cyborgs are frozen until their psychic handlers need them for combat. Doing the concept work for this race was some of the most fun I have had with this project.

With most of the initial concept and design work done, the group broke apart of the summer as school wound down. I remained here in Savannah to work on the design document and coordinate getting a few things done over the summer. One of these things was an early version of a level engine up and running. According to our programmer, setting this up would be the hardest part of the project. In a few days, he turned out a Flash file that replicated the look and feel of most isometric strategy games. You can find an early version of it by following this link.

Throughout June and into July we continued to make what I considered excellent progress with the project. Artwork was being produced and handed out to model, the design of the game play was coming along nicely, and the code was growing in leaps and bounds each time I saw it. In August, the progress slowed due to the distance between the members of the project. Overall, I think it is very difficult to keep members of a team interested and willing to work on a project if they are not around the other members on a daily basis. Things tend to fall apart much in the same way that long-distance relationships can fall apart. However, work continued on the code, and before the end of the month we had a moving unit on our map with a limited movement radius and a map that could be randomly generated. I would love to show you those files here, but they have disappeared for reasons that will be explained shortly.

In September school started again, and everyone returned ready begin working on the project in earnest. However, there was one problem: our lead programmer was nowhere to be found, and he had the game code files. For a week and a half we tried to track him down, with no success. This left us is a very difficult spot. Without him or his files, we were dead in the water. The person who was slated to be setting up our network ops through FlashCom for the multiplayer portion of the game volunteered to take over the lead code position provided we could find the files for him to work on. We eventually were able to access the original lead coder’s section of the school’s network and find the most recent version of all the game files.

However, this just led to another heartbreak. The code was completely uncommented and was structured in a very abstract manner. If we attempted to decipher what it was doing, it would take us almost as long as if we were to write the whole thing from scratch again. We had time to do neither.
We started to look into other options for mediums to build the game in. Eventually we settled on Garage Games’ Torque engine. It had the flexibility we needed, and the school was willing to buy us the licenses we needed for the game. Plus the new lead coder was very eager to produce a game in the Torque environment, and the full 3D nature of the engine would allow our artists a much more refined tool to work with. In a single day, we had looked over the edge of the cliff at the edge of the abyss, spit in it, turned…and then walked away knowing that we were not beaten just yet.

However, we were still in for a bumpy ride. Within two days of changing the engine, I realized that with the expanded potential of Torque came a huge downside. Our art pipeline was now so fat and bloated we would never be done. There were not enough hours in the days between then and November 11th for the work we would have produced to have any sort of polish. So, I went into triage mode. What could I cut from the game that would not destroy the play and basic elements we were going for? The answer was a lot, surprisingly.I completely threw out the races, but kept their skills and basic themes. I threw out the persistent game stats and unit leveling. I threw out 90% of the models and concept art, and went with a single idea, an idea that revolved around one creature.

This one:


I had the idea of making it a sort of wizard's chess that revolved around these little imp creatures, which I named the Malebana after the spacemen from the original design. The wizards would command them to do battle on playing board, and depending upon which of the schools of imping your wizard came from the malebana would wear different outfits. In this way were able to keep the skills and stats we created for the original three races and shrink our art pipeline by eliminating the extra models and simply adding some more detail to an existing one. It also gave us a much more unified aesthetic to work off for the game. We no longer had to think about three completely different art concepts, but instead one unified one. This gave our interface team a lot of freedom, which they have put to some incredible use.

The change also gave us a chance to redesign the visuals of races in regards to this new imp idea. We modified the elementals to be a school of imping that was shamanistic and in tune with nature. We took a visual cue from traditional African and Asian masks to give the school a very striking visual look.







For the spacemen race we changed them into a Greco-Roman Imperial footman, completely with shining armor and a helmet. For the corporate zombies we changed them into evil little insect imps that have become the favorite model of the team.
I do not have concept art of those two art my finger tips at the moment, but what I do have is a few animations of the Imperial and Shaman group. But don’t worry, I’ll get art and animations for the third race up very soon.

Follow the links below to Quicktime animations of a few special attacks.

One
Two
Three
Four

Right now, we are just at two thousand words for this single entry, which I know is a bit excessive. I promise in the future to keep entries at a more readable length, unless they are design essays or critiques.

If you want to read the original version of the design doc that I was developing over the summer, you can find it here. Just keep in mind that this version was never finished, but it should give you a general idea of what we were going for.

Also, if you wanted to take a look at the time line we planned out for the production take a look at the critical paths and important dates documents that you can find by following those links. And no, the schedule hasn’t held. I’ll be explaining why in my next post.

If you have any comments about what you’ve read or have found any bugs, glitches, typos, gross inaccuracies or just all around brain farts…please let me know by hitting the CONTACT button to the left.

Yes, I know my resume is corrupted. I’ll fix that soon.

Check back in the near future, because updates will be going up at least three times a week.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

-Zach W.

All the still art on this page is done by Stephanie Waugh.
The Imperial Models were by Tim Robinson, and they are animated by me.
The Shaman models were by Tim Robinson and Andrew Razkowski, and are animated by Andrew Razkowski.
All work is copyright of their respective author.
All print work is mine.