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29 May 2010
Adrift: Released
We're finally letting our baby see the world! Adrift is ready for the public, and although there are still a few rough spots here and there, we're proud to present you with our first game prototype.
19 May 2010
Post Mortem: Adrift: Episode 01
Semester Games started as two students, a techie & an artist, discovering Unity and pounding out a game in 10 days for a show. From there, we started planning for the IGF and instead ended up directing a team of 20 in the first ever prototype production course at the Academy of Art University's School of Game Design. It was a hectic 15 weeks, spent largely in crash-production mode, which has undoubtedly shaved a few years off of our collective lifespan. However, with all the snags we've found along the way, we've learned to appreciate all the things we did right. For all the long nights and head scratching, this has been a massive educational experience for everyone involved.
WHAT WENT RIGHT
Sharing The Load - As a first project for the team and institution, The Island was a massive undertaking. A new team with an untested pipeline had us always running a million miles a minute, while being pulled in every direction. To shoulder all the chaos alone would have been murderous, but by using both our talents and energy, we were able to split up the stress. Sharing responsibility between Art Director & Tech Director allowed us to maintain some glimmer of sanity by focusing on our respective tasks, knowing the rest was taken care of. Trust is the name of the game, here.
Our Generous Host - Starting something new is always difficult, and it was a huge boon to be working with the AAU. The school was able to provide us with the facilities, software, and manpower to get us started. As a group of young people with no investors or start-up capitol, this was definitely the best way to go.
Simplicity Of Design - "The Island: Episode 01" was designed from the start to be just that: a first episode. We didn't want to tell an epic-length story, or make hours-worth of minigames; this was an introduction of our character & setting to the player, and of us to the world. We kept the story lighthearted and the visuals basic to ensure that we didn't get caught in the minutia of our lore, or in rendering the perfect specular highlight. For these purposes too, working in Unity 3D's middleware engine was a dream-come-true. It allowed us to forgo the labor pains, and jump straight into teaching the baby to walk. In a matter of weeks, our scripters with little-to-no background in programming were able to get up to speed and producing full functionality, with little more than the expected hiccups.
WHAT WENT WRONG
If We Only Had A Brain - A major setback for us was the lack of a designated producer. Having another leader whose sole responsibility was to oversee production would have been enormously helpful. Managing our respective teams kept our heads in the whirlwind of either art or code, which made it surprisingly impossible to step back, with clear vision and see the project as a whole. Its safe to say that we neither understood, nor appreciated the very unique skill set required to be a producer when we started, but boy do we know now!
"What happened? Where the heck am I?" - Telling our story has been a stumbling block the whole way through. The AAU has a large and robust animation department, from which most of the students in the School of Game Design transferred in. Because of that, we'd planned on using somewhat extensive pre-rendered cutscenes to tell our story and build the setting. However, for a number of reasons, (time constraints, mis-communication, and student attendance for starters) these videos never came to be. However, we'd never really considered a Plan B in this case, and found ourselves struggling to tell our story or provide character and perspective to the player. As these things go, we inevitably found a basic solution via a text overlay and scrolling storyboards, but our future projects will definitely approach the subject differently.
Style Police - Our team was largely comprised of Environmental 3D Artists, most of whom were specifically trained to work one way. Which would be great if that one was the same for all of them! However, the nature of working through the school meant that we had no influence over the backgrounds of the people that signed onto the project, which led to a lot of confusion with the art style and its interpretation. Creating an outdoor, organic environment was a huge issue, as it required a very unique way of thinking, which most of our team was unaccustomed to. We'd set out to make a semi-cartoon-inspired look and feel with hand-painted textures and thick, chunky models, but had a very harsh reality check when faced with the fact that most of our 3D modelers had very limited texturing experience, and virtually no painting experience. However, by the time we'd found all this out, we were already weeks into production, having taken time to introduce the project and getting to know our team, which was far too late into the 15 week schedule to make drastic changes to the art direction. Our simple and fun art direction, designed to save production time ended up causing more problems and needing far more re-education than we ever could have seen coming.
FINAL THOUGHTS
To wrap things up, lets get some perspective: our team of 20 students, with zero professional experience, met for 3 hours, once a week, for a 15 week semester. That means that in only 45 hours, we built an entire third-person adventure game including environmental interaction, minigames, three unique explorable areas, and a boss fight, from scratch. The visuals aren't quite where we'd hoped, the cutscenes didn't really happen, and some of the scripts could be massaged a bit, but for what we had to work with? We think we did alright!
WHAT WENT RIGHT
Sharing The Load - As a first project for the team and institution, The Island was a massive undertaking. A new team with an untested pipeline had us always running a million miles a minute, while being pulled in every direction. To shoulder all the chaos alone would have been murderous, but by using both our talents and energy, we were able to split up the stress. Sharing responsibility between Art Director & Tech Director allowed us to maintain some glimmer of sanity by focusing on our respective tasks, knowing the rest was taken care of. Trust is the name of the game, here.
Our Generous Host - Starting something new is always difficult, and it was a huge boon to be working with the AAU. The school was able to provide us with the facilities, software, and manpower to get us started. As a group of young people with no investors or start-up capitol, this was definitely the best way to go.
Simplicity Of Design - "The Island: Episode 01" was designed from the start to be just that: a first episode. We didn't want to tell an epic-length story, or make hours-worth of minigames; this was an introduction of our character & setting to the player, and of us to the world. We kept the story lighthearted and the visuals basic to ensure that we didn't get caught in the minutia of our lore, or in rendering the perfect specular highlight. For these purposes too, working in Unity 3D's middleware engine was a dream-come-true. It allowed us to forgo the labor pains, and jump straight into teaching the baby to walk. In a matter of weeks, our scripters with little-to-no background in programming were able to get up to speed and producing full functionality, with little more than the expected hiccups.
WHAT WENT WRONG
If We Only Had A Brain - A major setback for us was the lack of a designated producer. Having another leader whose sole responsibility was to oversee production would have been enormously helpful. Managing our respective teams kept our heads in the whirlwind of either art or code, which made it surprisingly impossible to step back, with clear vision and see the project as a whole. Its safe to say that we neither understood, nor appreciated the very unique skill set required to be a producer when we started, but boy do we know now!
"What happened? Where the heck am I?" - Telling our story has been a stumbling block the whole way through. The AAU has a large and robust animation department, from which most of the students in the School of Game Design transferred in. Because of that, we'd planned on using somewhat extensive pre-rendered cutscenes to tell our story and build the setting. However, for a number of reasons, (time constraints, mis-communication, and student attendance for starters) these videos never came to be. However, we'd never really considered a Plan B in this case, and found ourselves struggling to tell our story or provide character and perspective to the player. As these things go, we inevitably found a basic solution via a text overlay and scrolling storyboards, but our future projects will definitely approach the subject differently.
Style Police - Our team was largely comprised of Environmental 3D Artists, most of whom were specifically trained to work one way. Which would be great if that one was the same for all of them! However, the nature of working through the school meant that we had no influence over the backgrounds of the people that signed onto the project, which led to a lot of confusion with the art style and its interpretation. Creating an outdoor, organic environment was a huge issue, as it required a very unique way of thinking, which most of our team was unaccustomed to. We'd set out to make a semi-cartoon-inspired look and feel with hand-painted textures and thick, chunky models, but had a very harsh reality check when faced with the fact that most of our 3D modelers had very limited texturing experience, and virtually no painting experience. However, by the time we'd found all this out, we were already weeks into production, having taken time to introduce the project and getting to know our team, which was far too late into the 15 week schedule to make drastic changes to the art direction. Our simple and fun art direction, designed to save production time ended up causing more problems and needing far more re-education than we ever could have seen coming.
FINAL THOUGHTS
To wrap things up, lets get some perspective: our team of 20 students, with zero professional experience, met for 3 hours, once a week, for a 15 week semester. That means that in only 45 hours, we built an entire third-person adventure game including environmental interaction, minigames, three unique explorable areas, and a boss fight, from scratch. The visuals aren't quite where we'd hoped, the cutscenes didn't really happen, and some of the scripts could be massaged a bit, but for what we had to work with? We think we did alright!
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