Summer 2013: Week 1

Getting prepared for an Orphan Adventure Game.

This is the first of a series of weekly updates for the blog and today, I figure I'll talk a little bit about Orphan Adventure Game. If you are not interested in OAG, then at the end of this blog post I introduce a new topic that may offer insight to the world of student developers (at least at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont).

Orphan Adventure Game

OAG is currently a project that I plan to prototype and develop with Matt Barrett and Jack Yeates over the next seven to eight weeks. I explained the concept of the game in my previous update, but to simplify, it's a three phase RPG where you explore, shop and battle as a rag-tag group of musical orphans. The phases take inspiration from various rouguelikes, Second Wind, Final Fantasy, Mother 3 and The Binding of Isaac, though these mostly inspire the exploration and shopping systems. The battle system is based on musical orphans using sounds and music to defeat their foes, but it's not a rhythm-based system. It's in it's early stages, but as time goes on and more progress is made, I'll reveal more about it.

The game's prototype is going to be made in AS3 as to give it a large, easily-accessible target audience and distribution stream, but the full-game, assuming the prototype(s) pan out, will be written for other platforms. I'm aiming to release a full-version of the game as a multi-platform, browser/mobile/personal computer venture, but judging by how poorly AS3 handles sound, I may end up abandoning browsers. We will see.

Currently, I am working on making sounds work smoothly in AS3 and as far as the prototype is concerned, I think that I am satisfied with what I have. I'm more or less brand new to the platform and I'm not using any libraries or anything (since I'm preparing for college classes that will make me use AS3), so next on my list of things to figure out is moving between phases and therefore between "rooms". My projected path is as follows:

1. Make sure sounds are working and write fade-in/fade-out functions.
2. Determine how to switch between phases (combat, exploration, and shop) and move between rooms.
3. Begin prototyping of combat phase without an inventory. This will require basic character classes and stats.
1. While doing this, I will also work on a message-box/dialogue/text-handling system to display text elegantly.
2. I will also begin messing with animations and visual assets.
4. Begin work on exploration phase.
1. This will include writing something that will randomly generate rooms, but will allow me to create scripted events for the plot progression.
5. Begin work on shopping phase.
1. This will involve writing an basic inventory system, though this system may be written sometime earlier.
6. After making sure the phases are fun, I'll begin polishing the phases.

Motivated Design: Part 1

Aside from creating Dolphin Squadron and starting on a variety of other projects like Orphan Adventure Game and Voyage, my freshman year at Champlain College also introduced me to a slew of potential problems that I didn't know existed, namely the lack of motivation, cloud of resentment and propagation of rivalry (sometimes negative) among some aspiring game developers. The most startling thing about this though was that these problems were being partially created by me and my team! This realization was definitely a sort of wake up call for myself and for the rest of us (we were trying to inspire people, not demotivate or upset them!), so, over the next couple of weeks, I think that I'll discuss the issue of motivated design and developers at Champlain College and abound.

An Introduction to the Issue

The issue arose when we found that our loosely defined "team", ACPC Productions, was being resented for being composed of people who, as freshmen, were very vocal about wanting to make games. Because we had actively sought out and "allied" with talented people that we worked well with, we had inadvertently upset a pretty large group of people (freshmen and upperclassmen included) that saw ACPCP as two things: an entity that was attempting to "steal" talented people away from the other developers and a clique of pretentious asshats that thought that because we had a team, a name, and ideas, that we were better than everyone else.

At first, I found it absurd that people would think something like that about us--all we wanted to do was make games and as a group that's what we did--so when we heard this from Brook, the team was more or less devastated and many of us took the news to heart. But as time went on, we began to realize that we could have potentially been upsetting people because of what we were trying to do. We wanted to make games, but so did everyone else. The problem was that with the way we approached game development, we came across as pretty self-serving or at least cliquey. We wanted to inspire people, but we were doing the opposite.

All Talk, No Games

We actively work on a lot of projects. Screenshot from the document I use to manage our "teams" and projects.

Because we work on a lot of projects (not all games), speak openly about most of them and then create and release a lot of promotional artwork (but few prototypes), we can be seen as a team that is all talk and no games. And judging by this list, which doesn't include a couple of my projects like City Across the Sky (prototype) or Voyage (concept), you can see that we do, in fact, work on a lot of projects, with only two being anywhere near completion: Dolphin Squadron and End Love. 

In addition to this, we were fairly large. This upset people and made it look like we were just arbitrarily adding people to the "clique". This was especially harmful because the whole team is usually never working at the same time. Dolphin Squadron, for example, was developed by myself, Brook and Jack Yeates, with the rest of the team occasionally doing QA and usability testing. Even more so than that though, was how we over-scoped our games at various game jams in an effort to push ourselves as hard as we could go. This led to the development of the idea that we couldn't really finish anything and spread it through a public, developer-centric space. 

A New Idea: The EDC

At that point pretty much, ACPCP and the idea of us being the group to inspire other groups at our college, was fucked. We had to improve our image, get rid of the name or do something else. James Shasha (Designer) was keen on the idea of getting rid of the name and starting anew; Brook Chipman (Artist) wanted to reduce the size of the team down to the original members (the Project Clusterfuck team); I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't want to kick anyone out and I didn't want to lose the name that we started with. I also just wanted to work on and finish Dolphin Squadron. I just wanted to make games.

We decided to reorganize around this idea of a community of student developers. A place where anyone could go and work on anything they wanted. We designed a club that acted as a place for people to go to pitch ideas, form teams and make progress. Pretty much what we did within ACPCP, but open to everyone and not just the members of our clique. That was the idea behind the EDC, the Extracurricular game Developers of Champlain. We turned it into a club and suddenly, a lot of the negative emotions began disappear, and people seemed genuinely interested in the idea.

PART TWO OF MOTIVATED DESIGN NEXT WEEK.

Expect Greatness.

Ryan Huggins~