2013: Project Sell-It

Project Sell-It was the first project of the 2nd year. In this, we had three weeks to work together with marketing students to come up with a game that we would pitch to a publisher. We were tasked with coming up with a game that would last 5 minutes, had monetary value, and would deliver an emotion.

What our group of five came up with was a game which would abuse a loophole. We came up with something that had 5 minute play sessions, but which also had multiple divergent paths as well as multiple areas and three diverse characters. It was based on the 'save scumming' principle, which comes from games that allow multiple choices (mostly RPGs): Do something, then reload to see how it could have been done differently. So for our game you could play it, then be encouraged to start up again and see how you could have done things differently.

It was story focused, but did not have dialogue or anything written down: Everything would be driven by what the player did and saw to tell a small, personal story. The setting was post-apocalyptic, but tried to offer something different by setting it right after the bombs fell. The boy had to go into the city to find medicine for his father, the old man had to go into the subways to retrieve a photobook he left behind while he fled the city (the only keepsake he has left of his friends and family), and a teenage girl that has to go into the woods to hunt for food. It could be monetized with an initial sale that offered the three standard characters, and then it could be taken further by offering new modules, each with (a) new character(s) and/or area(s).

2013: Cyberpunk Noire.

While I wanted to get into the Game Art course, prior to joining I had no experience with working in game engines or, for that matter, working with 3D software. So the "3D Modeling in Maya Autodesk" and "Unity" classes were my first run in with both. I took to it surprisingly well. Each class had their own final assignment: For Unity, it was to simply make a game. With 3D Modeling, create a room, texture it, and import it into a game engine. Because they were both due shortly after each other with only a few weeks apart, I decided to use this overlap.

Two early WIPs.

First, I made a Unity game that would use the (untextured) models from my Maya assignment and expanded on these with some low poly extra models. Programming has never been my strong suit and while learning to use Unity it continued to prove tricky, so I decided to focus on creating something that would focus on the visuals and audio. Because I didn't yet have textures to work with, I played around with colored shaders, image effects (thanks to my school's Unity Pro desktops) and the lighting.

The final result can be seen in action here: https://vimeo.com/67118069

When that was done I moved on to wrapping up the 3D part of the assignment, and gave the room (not the hallway and city I made for the Unity part of it) textures before importing it into Unity to work on it further there. I already played a bit with Image Effects, and decided to take it further here, and it led to a pretty spiffy result.