Ryan T. Miller
Game Designer
NOW! That's What I Call Cyborgs!
Purpose:
Create a game for the three month mid-degree project at Full Sail University, as part of the Game Development Bachelors
Description of Game:
2D Sidescrolling Action Shooter
Team Setup:
5 Programmers, 1 Associate Producer (Teacher), 1 Executive Producer (Teacher), 1 Sound Engineer, 6 Artists (1 being a faculty member)
My Role:
AI and Systems Programmer / AI Designer
Tools I Used:
Visual Studio 2012, C++, GIMP, Git + Tortoise
My Contribution to the Project:
Creation of the menu systems, core architecture (entity manager and inheritance structure), collision systems, event management, message management, and all AI related code, including squad behaviors and faction based fighting
Thoughts on the Project:
This project was the first time that I could devote all of my time to working with a team on a singular project, with producers, deadlines, all the usual aspects of Game Development in the industry.
I put a lot of time into designing out the game, as the others on the team didn't have a huge interest in doing so, and this was my first time putting so much into the design of a game. We had a lot of components we had to balance out, and due to the fact that the game had two different enemy factions (Robots and Humans) that both fought you as well as each other, there was a lot of design that had to go into how these would face off against each other as well as you.
Moreover, I got my first taste of a crunch development cycle as things went wrong and the deadlines started to approach. But my team and I pulled together and got the work done, turning out a solid shooter with multiple factions, levels, and weapons to play.
I certainly learned that it is important that everyone on the team know what they are responsible for and understand what happens if they don't do their work on time, as we had a lot of bottlenecks due to poor planning on our part to determine how to get multiple levels of tech done in tandem.
It was an enjoyable project though because I got to actually see a game through from start to finish, written with mostly our own code (we used a modified Full Sail engine for audio and 2D rendering).