Structure of Game Production: My First Game

The amazing thing about Full Sail University is that not only do you get a ridiculous amount of hands on programming experience you also have the opportunity to make a few games while going through the curriculum. Structure of Game Production was the first class that I had the opportunity to work with a group in and make a game, the first time I was reassured that I was pursuing the right field!

When the class started we came up with game ideas and were grouped together according to who wanted to work on what game. Myself and three others classmates where paired together and the game we decided was a tower defense. Now for those of you that don't know me, before Full Sail I was a strictly console gamer so I didn't play many tower defenses, needless to say I had to do my research which I didn't mind. Now before we could start working on the game it was mandatory for us each to make an editor for the game that would make asset integration easier. We were tasked with making a tile editor, animation editor and particle editor. We each took and editor, mine being the animation editor. The cool part about making a animation editor was that we had the opportunity to make it in c# which we had a class on and now I was getting to use what I learned in class to make my gaming life easier.

While making our editors we also had to plan out our game from the platform to be played on to the main features of the game.

The idea of the game was set in an office building where you were tasked with setting up towers to make sure that the top floor was never reached. After careful planning and balancing we expended to have a handful of different towers that upgraded and had abilities that could be activated. 

The Setting is present day, in a New York city skyscraper, which has been taken over

by the military. Using various Military weapons, your task is to set up a defense against waves of the evil corporate employees to stop them from reclaiming control of the skyscraper.

After careful planning of the game's design it was time to plan out how we were going to code it in c++;

Finally it was time for us to start coding.... well except we had to assign coding tasks to everyone, which we used Scrum to do. 

After 2 months of hard work we had a finished product and even manged to make it onto the arcade machine!

Final Project: Rise From Perdition

Final project at Full Sail University was a big stepping stone for me in my academic career, final project is a 5 month long cycle where you are tasked with making a game with several other members of what will soon be your graduating class. For me personally the challenge was something that I was looking forward to since I started at Full Sail, a chance to show off what I could do and to make something awesome! After being given our groups my class was split into two groups, my group consisting of 7 members decided that after some hard brain storming wanted to make a Puzzle Platformer.

the game was called Rise From Perdition, We originally Wanted to name the game O.O.B.E(Out Of Body Experience) but quickly realized that we needed to get our creative juices flowing because that name is horrible! So finally after much consideration and thought we came up with Rise From Perdition. The game turned out well, by our final turn in we had an in game level editor and a server that custom levels could be uploaded to so that everyone could experience the joy and thrill of playing each others levels.

Collision Library functions

If you get the chance to play let me know what you think!!!