10/06/2014 - Rapid Prototyping

This Monday evening our beloved ex-president (now vice) gave a talk on rapid prototyping. Pulling from his past experiences and especially his ongoing student IGF project, he went through the process and benefits of this development process.

Some of the things to take away from his presentation...

1. Prototypes are a great way to get an idea of how your brainstormed ideas will work as games.
2. They save a lot of time due to not requiring a lot of coding.
3. Set a deadline on each prototype.
4. Before starting, make sure to ask yourself, "what do I want to learn from this prototype?"

Next week Patrick will be giving a talk on gameplay balance. We'll also be talking about GDC, so if you plan on coming, or are interested in how the largest Game Developers Conference operates come join us!

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Unnatural Selection - Team Asiana's Game Jam Entry

This game came out of our recent 48-hour game jam. It was made by Team Asiana, which included Youhao Wei, Zuoming Shi, Duy Huynh, and Ky Tran. They made the game using GameMaker, and it was interesting that they decided to figure out how to give the game an isometric perspective.

The premise of this game is to control an army of artificially created monsters. The game allows you to select from several different monster parts, and putting them together gives you units with different stats. It's mostly functional aside from the fact that you don't have any enemies to attack (they were removed during the last few minutes before the deadline due to some glitches that couldn't be solved). Despite those problems, this game was perhaps the most well presented, since it featured a menu screen, music, and lots of great artwork.

Click here to play the game.
Click here to download the source files.

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Humans Attack - Team Awesome's Game Jam Entry

This game was made during our recent 48-hour game jam by Team Awesome, which was composed of Hunter Haynes, Rachel Brindle, and Sean Stephens. They started out with a very ambitious game idea: they wanted to make some kind of real-time strategy game with online multiplayer, and the central mechanic was built around allowing players to hack into parts of the game. It was about halfway through the weekend, they realized that their idea was impossible.

When Team Awesome decided to abandon their original game idea, they took an old particle-based system that Sean had worked on sometime ago and turned it into a game about zombies. The premise is that the player controls the waves of zombies (in green) and tries to use them to kill the humans (in blue). They loosely tied it to the game jam's theme ("Artificial") under the idea that zombies are artificial life.

People seemed to generally really like this game, and it was voted second place out of all of the games from the event.

Click here to play the game.
Click here to download the source code.

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Plants vs. Robots - The Red Team's Game Jam Entry

This was the winning game from our recent 48-hour game jam, and it was made by the Red Team, which included Cindy Trieu, Sean Grogg, Livio De La Cruz, and a little help from Joshua Djakaria. During that weekend, this team was pretty inspired by the Studio Ghibli films that they had watched recently, and they were even listening to the films' soundtracks while working on this game.

The main mechanic of this game is the ability to grow vines by clicking and dragging on them. Both the character and vine animations received a lot of praise, even though the rest of the game was relatively unpolished and had many glitches.

The funny thing about this game is that it's almost completely contradictory to the game jam's theme, which was "Artificial". If it wasn't for the one robot in the game (which was literally added in the last 20 minutes of the game jam), then the game technically wouldn't have qualified.

Click here to play the game.
Click here to download the source code.

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Detonator (GameMaker Prototype)

Detonator is a puzzle game where the player tries to detonate all of the explosives in a level using only three matches. Zuoming Shi created this rapid prototype over the Labor Day weekend using GameMaker.

Click here to download the executable for Windows computers.

If the executable doesn't work for you, click here to download the original GameMaker project. You will also have to download GameMaker in order to run these files (the lite versions are free).

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Fighting Blind (Flash Prototype)

Fighting Blind is a two-player game prototype about fighting in the dark. Both players are hidden in complete darkness, but almost every movement they make is noisy enough to visually give away their locations.

This game was designed and built by Livio De La Cruz last weekend, and the purpose was to practice rapid prototyping strategies. Livio came up with the idea for this game a couple days before starting to build it, and it only took about three days to make (less than 15 hours total).

Click here to play Fighting Blind.
Click here to view the project on Github.

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Beyond (GameMaker Prototype)

Last April, a few of us started a game project with the goal of making a game for the Independent Games Festival. The project ran into several problems [which we discussed during this meeting], but one of the biggest problems was that we were prototyping at an insanely slow pace. This prototype stood out as one of the more exceptional ones, because it was completely playable and it was made rapidly over the course of a few days.

This prototype was designed and programmed by Zuoming Shi using GameMaker, and it features artwork by Amy Pribadi and Pooria Rashidi.

Click here to download the executable for Windows computers.

Click here to download the original GameMaker file. You will need the full version of GameMaker to run it, but you can access the program for free from the McClelland Park 102 Computer Lab (make sure you use the Mac side of the computers, not Windows).

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Get the Gem (Stencyl Prototype)

This short platformer was built by Livio De La Cruz as a sample game for SISTA's Game Design Workshop. It was built using Stencyl, which is a relatively new but very well designed game-making tool.

The tile-based artwork of the game was drawn by members of the the web community Interguild.org.

Click here to play the game.
Click here to download the original Stencyl files. You will have to download Stencyl to use these files.

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Captain Pogostick (GameMaker Prototype)

Captain Pogostick is a wacky platformer about a police officer who fights crime while riding a pogo stick. Your character is constantly bouncing up and down, and you can build up vertical momentum by jumping off high ledges.

This game was made by Livio De La Cruz and Joseph Thibodeau for the final project in the game design class ISTA 251.

Click here to download the executable for Windows.
Click here to download the original GameMaker files.

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Scrambled Ed (GameMaker Prototype)

Scrambled Ed is a super-wacky platformer, where you play as an insane man with a freakishly large nose and C-4 explosives strapped to his head. You can use your nose to hang onto the edges of platforms, almost as if you were a Tetris piece. The explosives on your head will detonate if you become too happy, either from collecting too many presents, or from thinking too many happy thoughts (by pressing the down-arrow key).

This game was made by Alex Brown, Dylan Clavell, and Zuoming Shi for one of the projects in the game design class ISTA 251.

Click here to download the executable for Windows.
Click here to download the original GameMaker files.

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