He Thinks He Can Design Things

Isaac just sent this concept art of our game for the Ubisoft project. Looks pretty amazing!

It's winter break and you'd think I'd be kicking back, drinking out juice out of exotic fruits in the harsh cold of Boston but NO! Instead I am working on a prototype for the Ubisoft Game Lab competition that the EAE program was invited to participate in. My team is one of four competing to represent the UofU in the final competition at Ubisoft Montreal. There are about 17 other schools also entering into the competition but we are the only participant from the United States! What is my team's idea you ask? Read on to find out!

The end of this week marks the official end to my first semester as a master's student within the EAE program. What a crazy four months it has been! 

This past Thursday was the big/huge/super important Open House event for the EAE program. Being a producer, I was tasked with serving as sort of tour guide for incoming guests and show them all of the cool things we work on in the program and I was to be graded on it! How did I do? Was there cake at the event? Read on!

Whew, this week has certainly been a rough one with all of the extra activities going on in the EAE program. I got to say, there was one day this week where I was a little nervous about my current game project tentatively named, Impulse.

Well, this day was both fantastic and a little disappointing. We were all sitting down, waiting for our new client to be announced. It turns out that we don't have a new client and the prototypes this time are open ended.

Wow, what an end to a development cycle. The prototype looks amazing, our demo  really shines, and apparently I "killed it" with the pitch. I'm on cloud 9, at least I hope I am. And now onto the post-mortem!

Shoshone is live on the server and ready for everyone to play! I'm about to give my final pitch to the client on it in a few minutes but you can play it NOW! Read on for the link to play!!!

The team has finished their weekend assignments and I just got ripped apart for my dry-run presentation, so you know what time it is... PLAY-TEST TIME!!

Our game is looking good. I mean crazy good. The team and I have been super motivated on making this prototype the best thing that each of us has done this year. The game looks amazing and plays fantastic. What's left to dev on it, you ask?

This week was an insanely productive one. Perhaps the most productive dev week that I've had since starting the EAE program. Was it solely because of my good looks?

This week we start with new teams, new clients and new games. I also bought new pants. Actually, I didn't. I just take really good care of the ones I have.

The presentations are done and the wrap-kit is out to the Treadport clients. You know what that means... it's post-mortem time!

We finished development on Evenbloom! Check out the trailer for it above.

I have taken a break from playing games pretty much this whole week and have more thought about games that I want to make. How do they play? What is the player suppose to feel? How can I manipulate those feelings in the controls? I find it easier to thoughts on design into questions about game design and let my game idea revolve around that. It's something I picked up a few weeks ago and has just stuck with me.

While my design cap has been on this past week, things have been shifting around on Evenbloom with the rest of the team back in SLC. Uh-Oh!

It's been an awesome week back home, seeing faces that I haven't in weeks since my expedition to Salt Lake City for a career in video games had begun. I used this time to rest my mind a bit and think deeply about what I had learned about games in the past 6 weeks in the Master Games Studio. Did I learn anything of profound use? Find out the true meaning of Christmas? Or did I meet Damon Lindelof's creative coherence? Read on folks!

So since the last time I checked in, we've been pushing forward on the project with some great graphical work. Cody managed to program grass to lay on top of the terrain and sort of blew us all away with having it sway in the wind as well. It's really cool looking and brings the world to life, which adds to the alternative aspect of the game where the patient can just roam the land and enjoy the environment that is unfolding in front of them. Because this feature isn't really a game in and of itself it has sort of snowballed into the problem of the week.

It has been one hell of a week. Also, an amazing week in development of Evenbloom. The team worked really hard in our first sprint and we had a pretty amazing and ridiculous. T'was amazing because we got all of the main functions of the game to work in a stable framework and ridiculous because as the player was literally painting a terrain whose texture was a tiled picture of a bunch of corgis snuggling in a blanket. Oh the hilarity!

This week my team and I begin production on our new game, and boy are things getting interesting. Our clients this round consist of Neuroworx - a physical therapy clinic and a professor from the University of Utah who is one of the many working on a new device for physical therapy - the treadport. You can read more about the treadport here, but the jist of it is that it is a experimental treadmill with a pole/arm and harness that simulates natural forces from walking outside that normal rehab devices cannot do. Oh, and it also has 3 8ftx 8ft screens to immerse the patient in a virtual world as they walk.

My first reaction? I get to make a game for this thing! Yes!

It's done! Monty's Quest has been wrapped, pitched, and sent out of the door. Awesome job by my team ; Max, Vaibhav and Nathan. We finished at the 11th hour but it gone done none the less. The client seemed to be pleased and the pitch came off rather well. Personally, I thought it was a big improvement over the initial one. My handout was pretty good, my slides were timed well, and I thought my speechcraft certainly leveled up a few points. All and all, good stuff.

Now onto the Post-Mortem process of our game - Monty's Quest.

We're against the gun so to speak. Art assets are trickling in and and both Max and Vaibhav are plugging away at implementation. This is going to be a close one for sure but my team and I are dedicated to seeing the project through - for the client and for ourselves. This is the first game after all!

We're now on our second iteration of our current prototype for Promo's Quest. Amazingly, all of our basic mechanics are in order! We have a cheese avatar that runs automatically to the left and can jump with player input. We even incorporated some early platforming into the prototype as well as some other neat mechanics. How great is it?

Here it is, the first week of the program and I am already hard at work on my first game as a Producer. After conducting a random draft, I've been assigned a great dev team with Max and Vaibhav on programming and Nathan pulling out some amazing art designs. The whole class has been split up into teams and tasked with creating a game for an outside client coming to meet with us. This client ended up being Utah's own Beehive Cheese Company. Essentially, they are interested in what games can offer their brand and want to see what EAE students can bring to the table. My team's initial meeting could not have been better, within a few hours we had a solid core game concept. It was then up to me to step up to the plate and translate our ideas into an effective game pitch. Sounds fun!