Overview
This project is a collaboration between myself, Justin, Seoul, and Orion who all worked on individual areas of this project. My main role was to oversee any technical aspects of the project and take lead on the coding and development
Originally this project was intended for finding one possible solution to the struggle and stress of remote collaboration but we quickly left that behind, tested a bunch of new ideas for a while, and then finally settled on a game. Our goal with making a game was to inspire people and facilitate a fun experience for them while they play. We set out to make multiple games that only featured a couple interactive mechanics but we found that it was much easier to make one game and put all our efforts into it. The final result from this year's capstone is a bullet-hell game called "Graduator".
Process
In late April of this year we decided that it would be more fun to design games with a simple concept in mind which was to use as few mechanics as possible to make a fun game. This would allow us to do something we as a group were really interested in which was to explore how and why certain things make games fun. What is "fun?" is a question we asked a lot and tried to build four games that all had user interaction at their core but did something different as a result of that interaction. Similar to early 2000's era flash games, these were meant to be very simple and have no learning curve so players could just pick up the game and play. We also wanted to modernize the idea of having a website full of short, simple games by making ours mobile friendly. The majority of casual games are mobile and we didn't see a reason to ignore the increasing demand for mobile games by making ours exclusively for web, so this became an important constraint.
Eventually we found that is would be too difficult to research, test, and build multiple games that were all unique and desirable. When flash games were in their prime it wasn't uncommon to have thousands of them to choose from on a single website, but only a small handful were ever popular. I highly recommend checking out this website that shows this as a timeline of the most popular flash games and just how popular they got to be. Once we came together to find a topic that was interesting and relevant to us a group we finally landed on the idea of a bullet-hell game where a graduate must market themselves in a career fair to get hired. We all felt the idea was not only relevant to us now but would be again and again for each years' set of graduates.
We currently have a single, massive map that is sectioned into areas based on a company theme such as Microsoft (in game as "Bigcrosoft") for the player to navigate. Each area features job reps and a final boss which is represented by the "Head Hunter" character. My role in this project focused on the technical side. I was in charge of development and put the majority of my efforts into coding and updating the game itself. The game engine of choice is a visual scripting engine called GDevelop which is free and open-source and intended for making simple 2D games. There were some challenges along the way when it came to needing to code interactions in the game such as timing the dialogue, having the job reps move around, and camera movement that were really fun to overcome. The entire code base for this game is available on my student Github page here. That link takes you to the current development branch and I'll be adding the prototype link hosted on GameJolt soon once I solve a minor bug with the camera zooming.