The game I’m currently working on is called Devour. It’s genre-bending side-scrolling color-matching piece of awesome that I’ve been honored to be the Lead Designer and Artist for. My team is comprised of Tyler Buser (Level Design), Ryan Medeiros (Software Development), and Blake Yates (Level Design). These guys are fantastic. By the time we began actual development back in March, we already had a playable tech demo, a full week ahead of schedule. We deployed to Xbox for the first time today and the game runs incredibly well considering the limitations of our technology and the scare tactics of our professors and peers.
Tyler, Ryan and I first began developing our concept in our first Module at the Guildhall, back February, right before the break between mods. We all had pretty diverse ideas for what sort of game we wanted to build, but fortunately, I had written a treatment on what was to become Devour a week or so previously, when we were studying classic arcade games. This sense of direction helped propell us in a good direction, allowing us to amalgamate our ideas around a single core concept: our character can change between several colored auras. We wanted more time to snowball, but of course, we had to get our Concept Document written. We played as much as we could with the idea before hammering it down and codifying it in the Game Design Document the next week. I started working up concept art for our characters and environments at this point, and these informed the rest of the design process.
After the Game Design Document, we used our break to work on a tech demo, even though we had no idea that we would be doing this exact phase for our first milestone. I also worked hard on art over the break, chruning out a new game design for an outside game, a gun for unreal tournament 3 in 3dstudio max, and tiles for our game.
Real development began right after that. We started banging out levels and working on our mechanics in Torque, while our programmer worked on his own engine. We sped through the last three milestones just trying to make due, like the other teams, but we’ve been a step ahead on a lot of the curves. We haven’t really been in any danger of getting canceled at any point, which is good. We also specified and build the game in such a way that it seamlessly ported to the XBox on the first try. Only some very minor draw distance tweaking was required.
At this point, we’re finishing up our levels and fixing bugs for the most part.