Will of Nature

This project is one of the biggest project I've worked on so far. We made this game for the NHTV Gamelab 4 course in 14 days. As a player, you are a walking liquid water drop who can freeze and become an iceblock, of vaporize and become a cloud who rain down. Using those elements, and different objects in the level, you have to find collectables and solve puzzles to reach the end.

I was mainly responsible for the gameplay elements, the character controls, camera and player experience overall. During this time, I was the only one in our team who had direct communication with all the artists and designers. Ater recieving some feedback during development I wrote a specific tool that allowed artists (and designers!) to easily import levels from Maya to the engine, instantly converting models and material information (stuff like flagging material models with 32-bit texture "transparant"), taking away a lot of boring and repetative work for them.
This allowed them to work faster on level design, and playtest it without the need of programmers. This worked so well, that in the final day, the programming team got 4 new finished leveld the've never seen before,and could add to the final game without any issues.

Another task was improving the game experience for the player. To achieve this, I had a lot of play test sessions with designers, lecturers (giving great feedback) and other students; constantly tweaking (quick dirty hacking), to find the best match for the game. Unfortunately, this was quite a slow process, and resulted in a backlog of other tasks. However, it was until the very end, when all the game features, elements and levels were done that I found that this was actually worth every minute of my time.

In the end, I am quite proud of the final result of the game, everyone worked hard, and were rewarded with the best game of the year award!

Features

  • Made in C++ with Ogre3D, OgreMax, PhysX and FMOD
  • Developed custom build processes for artists and designers allowing quick prototyping
  • spending a lot of time with designers to finetune player experience
  • Won NHTV IGAD second year awards: Best Design, Best Audio, Best Art, Best Programming and Best Game!
  • Made in 14 days (one day a week).
  • Made by four programmers and a lot of artists

References