Project Overview
At Teesside University there is a project called the Journeyman Project, in this project there were a number of different teams which were made up of over thirty students which were doing one of the different games pathways that are available at Teesside University. I was very proud to be a pointed lead designer by our lectures and I had the responsibility of coming up with the main game designs, putting the team together and project management.
Blow you will see some exampels of the work me and my team put in to this game to develop it
Project brief
Every team had a different brief as the lead designers where able to change parts but some of the over all aspects of the brief were the same to make sure we didn’t all aim to big with our projects.
The parts of the brief that everyone had to follow here;
•We had to make three levels.
•We were only aloud 2 cut scenes.
•We had to use UDK (Unreal Development Kit)
•We had limited width but were able to build as high as we wanted
•The story line was that the player character was abducted by aliens and was put in a hologram test centre to test human emotion.
•Three months to do it in
The parts of the brief that I came up with were
•Our levels are going to be set on the island of Hashima
•Level one is set in the coal mines
•Level two is set in a school/apartment block
•Level three is set on the on the roof top
•Hashima had become over grown with plant life in the years humans
hadn’t been living there
•The only weapon the player got was a weed killer/ fertiliser gun
•Enemies where tree like people
•Boss was a massive worm root like thing.
• Player had to get to a helicopter in the roof to escape
•The human emotions we were testing were depuration, fear and the ability to overcome them and fight on.
•The two cut scenes would be at the start of level one to see game objective and after the boss battle to end the game
What I learned from this project
I learned a lot of different things when doing this project I would say the main thing was its all well and good aiming for the stars but make sure you have the time to do it. I had to cut a lot of ideas and different aspects from this game as they were just not viable with the time we had to do this project. One of the biggest problems we had with this project was the lack of a programmer for some reason the university didn’t see fit to give us a programing team which made implementing a lot of the AI and NPCS a lot harder than it should have been. We had to do it all the AI in Kismet which was very time consuming as kismet wasn’t really meant to be used to make a fully functioning AI system. This helped me to see that programing is a very big part of making games and is always needed.
