So, semester two rolled around and, unfortunately we lost one of our team members. Sonya who had worked for us in first semester had respiratory issues, which meant she had to stay at home and take care of her lungs. This left us without a programmer…
I’m pretty sure you guys know what happens when you have two artists and no programmers.
Several truckloads worth of art without anywhere for it to go. So we decided to do the only thing, as students of media, we knew how to do. Steph started storyboarding a trailer. And, I think, four weeks into the semester that we finally sat down and had the long talk of what we were going to do.
Due to our lack of technical expertise it was decided we would come out of this semester with two things to show:
1. A trailer that appropriately created the context and thematic style behind the,
2. Proof of concept demonstration of gameplay, which basically was a tiny miniscule part of the game, that gave a user the idea of “oh yeh! So that’s how it’s sposed to work”. I mean… seriously… the game we were thinking about making could have been a full length movie… It had 46 scenes.
That there was our “Sticky Note Wall of Doom” that we created in semester one as a way to work out the incredibly complex storyline. As you will probably never see the rest of this story line a quick summary is… Mum did it. I think, the thing is, during this year, having Christian as our supervising lecturer thingymajig, we were exposed to different ways of developing, such as this sticky note wall of doom, creating documentation organically through a blog (which is AWESOME!), and using a cyclical iterative production lifecycle, as opposed to standard production lifecycles that we tried to commit to during Games Lab in 2008 (I’ve never said it, but thanks Damo! The angry man that motivates, its a fine line to straddle 
) , and we weren’t afraid to branch out into other technologies, so, instead of using 3DS Max and the UT engine we went with Flash.
Oh boy… Then this happened:
So, basically, the story was, in semester one we had been working on our project using ActionScript 2. This we had inhereted from Sonya, who had pretty much mastered Flash (even creating visual content in flash… I know! I KNOW! ITS REDICULOUS). In semester two when I took over the bulk of the programming, using CS4, the default had become ActionsScript 3, which, stupidly I must now add, I decided, “Sure. New generation of script, must be more user friendly, right?”
HOLY SHIT! It was another programming language!!!!!
Programming Language + Artist =! anything coherent
It took me a week to figure out how to get mouse clicks to work! Compounded by the issue that the Flash Compiler was the buggiest thing to ever come out of a human orifice (I spent half a day trying to figure out why my project wasn’t compiling, only to close Flash to get a drink, come back, and it worked perfectly… INCONSISTENCY MUCH), I think the biggest issue at this time, and we were halfway through the semester, was the fact that we had to relearn ActionScript. You’re probably wondering why didn’t we just scrap that project and start again in ActionScript 2, and, my answer to that is:
“In retrospect… Yes”
Anyways, back to the project, we, at first decided to follow the style we had created with our final prototype in Semester 1, that of dark, gritty colour ( or as dark and gritty as we could manage in Flash). I started creating a new HUD for the prototype, while Steph was still working on the trailer.
We pretty much kept at this for about three or so weeks, just nutting out the assets, what functions needed to be completed and creating prototypes of these functionalities. I think we ended up with about 6 required functions, which were a GPS function, which allowed a user to move between scenes, an inventory for evidence, a media player to view certain peices of evidence, a mobile phone that was demoted from being central to gameplay to merely aiding the story progression (i.e. you would get phone calls and messages subtly indicating what you were supposed to do next) and a log that would automatically fill up as you began interviewing suspects (again, another aid to story progression).
And, when we finally got together after this bout of furiously working we had a look at it and went… Oh yeh? Hmmmmm maybe not. I think this was about the time that every other game out there decided that changing art style by adding some lines to characters was a good idea (OK by every game I’m probably only talking about Borderlands).
So after 8 months of work, we decided to go Black and White with colour splashes, going to film noir dated look using Madworld as an inspiration.
(Yes… I know… copyright pfft)
At this point, I think, it stopped becoming about the functions and more about the aesthetics – the visuals and the audio feedback. We had very little time to do a backflip and redraw everything in black and white. Cutting down again, we settled on creating one new theme and rehashing our original final prototype in semester one as a good starting point as well as redrawing the trailer in black and white with flashes of colour.
I’ve always been a pretty organized fellow and usually, things like this, I have sorted well before the event occurs even if it still requires all nighters before the deadline, and this was a whole new ball game for me (I’m not sure about Steph). Like running after someone with pants that are too big for you, I was pretty much “winging it” from this point. And, after handing in the materials yesterday, on time, I think it was the most valuable lesson I learned this year out of this subject.
It wasn’t the reminder of how sucky flash was to work with. It wasn’t how not to follow a production schedule in every way. It wasn’t even about this blog (even though it was an awesome idea). But, I think it was learning how to cope with massive change on the fly.
So, 43 blog posts, a trailer, a two flash files later and it’s just like the end of high school graduation all over again, that was how we laid to rest Games Project 2009, Mums the Word and our undergraduate education.
Heres the timeline of our production schedule I forgot to incorporate earlier
