Name: Tranquility

Genre: Experience/Platformer

My Role: Programmer, Art Support, General Design

Overview

This Platformer was made during my first semester at the Games Academy Berlin. We were a team of 6 working on it. Since this was our first project together it was fairly chaotic and the hierarchy just naturally grew out of the tasks we had to do and the abilities of each member of the team. Due to my background in computer science I was the designated programmer for this project, albeit I also helped out with some of the art (especially in the first area) and the general design. In this sense the design was definitely a team effort rather than the product of a single mind.

The game itself was supposed to be based around the theme of “anti-war” and we tried to carry a somewhat subtle message of the same tune through the whole game. The main focus was to transport this feeling of impending doom (like a scenario on the brink of war) to the player in a controlled manner. For this we used a lot of foreshadowing, such as a sign circling the word “war” on a billboard or a man playing a heavy tune on the piano.

Additionally we tried to create an ingame tutorial which doesn’t feel too out of place, for this we employed a shadowy figure of a girl to lead the player and show him what he is supposed to do.

Technical

For the code I used GameMaker:Studio Pro, albeit not using the build-in event system but straight code for the most part (Essentially using GameMaker like a simple framework for my code). For the art we used Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator along with Adobe Flash for the animations. Other Tools included Dropbox for file sharing and Microsoft Word for documentation.

Experience

I got very comfortable with GameMaker:Studio Pro during the semester, making it a handy tool for prototyping game ideas or certain mechanics. Also I strengthend my knowledge of Photoshop and learned how to use Illustrator. The much greater part of the learning was done on the personal side though. I learned how to properly integrate into a team and get things done with what we have.

The two most important things I took out of this project were though:



1. How to drop beloved features that would kill the project due to time restraints.

2. That pre-production and prototyping is extremely important for the success of a game project.

Additional

Completion time: Mai 2013 to September 2013

See Tranquility in motion