Backstage
Making a great game takes a lot of skill, coordination, and perseverance. Here you can get a sneak peak into the process - what we did and how we did it.
Constraints
We had to adhere to two restrictions - we need to make a serious game (educational or instructional), and it had to involve construction-based gameplay.
Early concepts spanned house-building, monkey society, and lots and lots of ants. The chemistry angle of the game was developed during a team meeting by combining our favorite concepts with some old fashioned brainstorming.
Concepts
Scale was very important - we wanted the player to feel dwarfed by the environment. The imprisoning biodome and the large, complex atomic structures give this effect whether the player is in the micro or macro world.
Survival gameplay was an early objective, but it took a few weeks to think of how to incorporate it. By putting containments in the air the player must scavenge for oxygen and remain more engaged when exploring.
Natural Environments were the way we wanted to go, but we were wary of such huge, open spaces. Players might get lost or loose interest when there isn't a clear direction to go. By confining the player to a biodome, we could keep the environments natural and directed.
Code
Every great program has its share of challenges. Here a just a few we overcame.Exploding Keeper - The Keeper occasionally had the bad habit of exploding when the player stopped examining something. We found and removed the default "explode-me" behavior.
Examine Copier - Initially when the player examined something, they saw a rotating copy. After returning from the examine view, the copy remain floating in the air! We redid it from scratch for other reasons, with the happy side effect of removing this bug.
Super-Speedy Targets - At first targets rotated according to the speed of the computer - the faster the computer, the harder the game! By taking time into account, we made the game possible for high-end computers.
Tools
We stand on the shoulders of giants. A big-thank you to all the companies that produce the tools we used.
| Tool | Uses |
|---|---|
| Assembla | Subversion space, Ticket Tracking |
| Maya | Modeling, Rigging, Animating |
| pmWiki | Tracking Deadlines and Contact Information |
| Modo | Modeling, UV-mapping, Textures |
| TortoiseSVN | OS-integrated code versioning |
| Unreal Engine 2.0 | Provides the Code Base |
| WOTgreal | The essential IDE for Unreal development |