Team High 5 - Final Report

Summary

After a full semester of work, we are very happy to present our finished version of "Adam!" - a cooperative multiplayer boss fighting action game for 2 to 4 players. In retrospect, we divided our work into three slices nicely distributed over the three releases:
  • Interim release: Technical implementation (Heightmap, Modeling, Animations, Effects)
  • Alpha release: Gameplay implementation (Content creation, Boss attacks, second level)
  • Final release: Refinement (Balancing, Controls, UI)

In terms of development schedule, we pretty much went on exactly as planned when seen over the whole semester with minor shifts. While we were lagging a bit behind at times, in the span between the interim report and the alpha report (for example, the schedule stated that there would be health bars for the interim report, but they were only done for the alpha report), we were able to catch up and even jump in front of the schedule when we had a fully functional and playable second level already at the alpha release date. This also refleced on the individual development layers, meaning that we had most of the Low Target implemented at the interim release and fully completed the Desired Target at the Alpha release while already working at High Target tasks. We were also able to keep all of those layers pretty consistent, with almost now changes in the Functional Minimum, Low Target and Desired Target and minor changes in the High Target (for example, we initially planned to reiterate the levels with increasing difficulty, but then dropped that in favour of a more fleshed out balancing over different player counts).

Looking at our sketches and our concept art again, we are also confident to say that we were able to preserve the initially planned game theme and were able to implement many of our ideas in a goal-based manner. Both of our levels in the final game look very similar to the sketches we made in the Design phase, and we think we also did a nice job in granting our main character Adam the cuteness we envisioned on our animation sketch.

Questionnaire

Next, this chapter should provide commentary about your experience during the class. How well did your initial design ideas materialize into the final game. Were you able to follow your development schedule, or did you deviate significantly from it? How did the different elements of the project structure (development schedule, prototype, playtesting, etc.) contribute to or hinder your progress?

Conclude by giving your personal impression of the course. Did it meet your expectations? Are you happy and proud of your game? Do you feel there wasn't enough time or that the schedule was too compressed? You might also consider these questions:

  1. What was the biggest technical difficulty during the project?

    This question is easy to answer by simply looking at the tasks on which we spent most time, which were the animations and the effects we implemented for our game. We decided to write up everything ourselves here and spent almost endless hours on writing a powerful animation player and a dynamic and scalable GPU-based particle system.

  2. What was your impression of working with the theme?

    If you look at our concept art again, you can see that we quickly had a very clear idea of how our game should look like in the end. Since we were convinced that this kind of game would work in the way we envisioned it, we took the freedom to spend our time on actually making our ideas come reality instead of thinking about whether they were "correct" or not with respect to the team. We still kept the concept of small creatures fighting against a giant boss, though.

  3. Do you think the theme enhanced your game, or would you have been happier with total freedom?

    This is a definive no - we think such a theme is neither necessary nor helpful. There were countless great ideas we scrapped just because they didn't fit in the theme, until we stuck with one that at least fit the theme a little bit.

  4. What would you do differently in your next game project?

    This is a hard question to answer, since it depends on what the goals would be for our next game project. If it was it judged in the same way as this game was in this course and we were trying to win the competition against other games, there would be absolutely no point in going through all our technical efforts again (even if we couldn't reuse the code from this game). If, however, we just wanted to produce something cool, we would probably follow the same approach as we had for this game again. It's not that we're not interested in gameplay development, but just that it's frustrating to work a lot on getting from A to B when you could start from B and get to C if you are judged simply on whether you reach C or only B.

  5. What was your greatest success during the project?

    We think our greatest success is that we managed to set the bar pretty high on what is possibly in terms of character animation in such a course. Our engine even contains very complex features such as attaching a fireball to the hand of a character while an animation is playing or overlaying different animations (throwing while running or jumping).

  6. Are you happy with the final result of your project?

    In the end, we are very happy and proud of what we achieved: We have a very solid and sophisticated technical framework and a fun-to-play game built on top of it. Even though the gameplay could have received even more tuning due to the large number of variables involved for our genre, we think we did a good job in creating a challenging game that still has a fair learning curve.

  7. Do you consider the project a success?

    Since success is usually judged on whether a team met its goals, we think our project is definitively a success. We implemented all of our desired target as planned and even managed to reach some of our high target goals.

  8. To what extend did you meet your project plan and milestones (not at all, partly, mostly, always)?

    As explained above in the summary section, this worked out pretty much as we planned it in our initial schedule.

  9. What improvements would you suggest for the course organization? (perhaps in D1 evaluation)?

    We were a bit disappointed with the organization of the course. On one hand, you expect us to follow the guidelines and hints you give us during the lecture, but then didn't upload many of the slides you showed. Futhermore, there was a whole lecture on music and sound, which was then not working at the alpha release demos. Or, you stressed at the beginning that this course is the chance to show off technical skills and implement some advanced features, but since we weren't judged on what we implemented but only on what we showed you, you could just as well use libraries or copy code to do the job, which many other teams did. In conclusion, while implementing our game was great fun, the inputs we got from you were often contradictory and sometimes even frustrating.

  10. Did you like the XNA framework?

    We think the framework does the job it's supposed to do without doing it exceptionally good or bad. For example, the content pipeline is there and works as expected, but lacks support for important features with respect to animation imports that we had to look up and write ourselves. In summary, the framework is very simple to start with and overcomes low-level hurdles, but can also be a big pain at times.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of our final game that in our opinion show nicely the gameplay and all the techniques employed to create "Adam!".

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Page URL: https://twiki.graphics.ethz.ch/bin/view/GameClass/2011Team5_Final_Report
2024-03-28
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