My junior year of highschool while taking computer programming courses on FLVS, I stumbled across a link to a game design competition (STEM Game Challenge). At the time I was a self-taught programmer for 3 years and I wanted to challenge myself to create something of my own. After a few days of research and self-motivation. I found the Unreal Engine, watched a few hours of tutorials, got a simple map together and I talked to my English teacher, Bonnie Plucinski-Chavik, who was a champion of the project and told me to write out a plot for the game and get the idea down. A week later, it became a personal project that I worked on over the term. I spent around 2 months, and a collaborative 200-300 hours learning the software and putting the game together, and went from knowing very little about 3D to making a game in 2 months.

The assignment/contest was to create a learning game for children around the ages of 6-8. My target subject was math, the game was designed to teach the basics of counting, addition, subtraction, and multiplication, as they progressed around the world, the player had to perform actions that used the principles of math that we were supposed to teach. I found resources from a math teacher at my school at the time, Howard Cohen. He directed me to the core k-12 website where I found the basic guidelines of what a child that age would be working on in a traditional school environment.

 

The player crash lands on an alien planet, knowing nothing of his purpose until he runs into an old friend who was sent in before him which tells him that the planet is under control by a dictator seeking to harvest their natural resourses and he is the cause of the war on the players home planet. The player has to escape and find the dictator to end the attack on his home planet.

 

My responsibilities for the project was, pretty much everything. I was the only one working on the project. So I had to focus on my specialization, thinking of creative ways to use Kismet and UnrealScipt to make interesting gameplay such as programming the teleportation gun, making the world interactive and using props to make gameplay, making game audio, writing out an interesting story. The art aspect was my shortcoming. I’ve never worked with a 3d modeling program before,  I was mostly responsible for placing assets to make the world look as pretty as possible. So about half of the models and animations were provided by the engines stock assets, making my job of having to learn 3d software a little less encumbering. But there were instances where the models I needed weren’t provided and I had to make them myself.

I want to give a big thanks to everyone that helped make this happen. Bonnie Plucinski-Chavik for making it possible and being a moderator for progress, Howard Cohen for offering help on teaching math and some direction for what to include in the game, as well as  Jaqui Feldman, Tom Orloff, Cynthia Disatham, and Marilyn Daenzer for the support. As well as my parents, for understanding my periodic bouts of panic, whenever udk crashed and errors came up.  Without you all, I would never be programming, making games, and art.

 

Currently, I've been working on a personal game project over the past few months, which I'll be recruiting artists for as the idea develops a bit further.