Game Dev Diaries is a series of articles and videos that follows a cohort of young game design students as they embark on their final projects. With interviews, insights, and interesting viewpoints, these articles aim to showcase these talented game designers and give you a peek into what it’s like to learn and become an indie games designer through university. For the final entry, we sat down and got some last thoughts and insights from the students, reflect on their time at university, and finally played their excellent games together.
This article is part of an ongoing series that follows a group of game design students as they develop their final projects. These are On The Brink by Holly Stevenson and Jay Sculfor, Cryptid Party by Tia Cameron, and Cauliflower Knight By Edward Hayward, Casey Cooper, and Mihails Mozajevs. Check out the other entries to Game Dev Diaries to see how the games develop and hear from these talented young developers!
This is it. The final entry in Game Dev Diaries (at least for now). Over the last few months, we have seen these projects shift and change into exciting and interesting games, and the students develop and show their skills and expertise, all whilst balancing group work and managing their big projects. Now as they approach the end of both their projects and time at university, I thought instead of me waffling on, we’d let the games speak for themselves for this last entry. So, we sat down, played their games, and simply got to see all the hard work they had done. Without further ado, here are our student’s final projects!
Cauliflower Knight
Tell us a bit about your game.
Our game, Cauliflower Knight, is a 3D puzzle platformer where you switch between two characters with varying abilities and attributes in order to solve puzzles, traverse the world and combat foes. You play as Yarlock, who can fight and block attacks, and Rhen, who is mobile and can reach high places.
What inspired you?
Our game is inspired by games from the late 90s to early 2000s that toyed with the idea of having two characters to play as simultaneously but never fully commit to the idea such as Banjo-Tooie, Wind Waker and Pikmin 2.
What methods/tools did you use to develop your game?
We use Unreal Engine 4 to develop the game, Blender to create visual assets, BeepBox for sound effects and music and GitHub which allows us to work on the game simultaneously while ensuring the game is in working order. We also use Trello boards in order to make sure that we all have something to keep us busy and keep the productivity going.
What’s a feature you are proud of?
We’re proud of the varied game feel between the characters as we feel that we have made them varied enough to feel like unique experiences but similar enough not to feel like two jarring games stitched together.
What was a challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
We found pre-production and planning very challenging, mainly because we strive to have each team member have strong influence over the creative outcome of the project; however, we all struggled to take initiative with decisions for a while. There was also a large debate over what mechanics should be included in order to deliver the experience we want to create.
As your project comes to a close, any last remarks about your project or time at uni?
Our time at university has been vital to acquiring the skills we now have to bring this project to life. It has been a stressful journey but since we put in the effort and made the most of our time here we have really grown as designers, programmers, artists and teammates.
Cryptid Party
Tell us a bit about your game.
Cryptid Party is a walking simulator made using the Unreal Engine 4 in which the player hosts a house party for Cryptids in a plot to summon the ultimate party god, attending to each guest’s needs to ensure the night ends with a bang.
Over the course of the game, the player will take requests from each of the troubled guests and explore the house through closets and cupboards to find and provide them with the item they need, attracting more and more guests to the house as they continue to accommodate their strange guests and unlock new areas to explore.
What inspired you?
Before developing Cryptid Party, I have always strived to produce a game that combines multiple of my long-time interests together into something stylish, memorable, and engaging for anyone to play. As an example of this, having the game be centred around Cryptids and other weird creatures was inspired by my own interest in the strange pseudoscience and each of the interesting, obscure stories that stem from it.
The gameplay within Cryptid Party was directly inspired by other games I personally enjoy within the walking simulator genre, such as broken Reality and the Frog Detective series. The setting of the game was a huge mixture of inspirations, from real events I’ve attended and others I had seen from new year’s celebrations to huge street parties, whilst also taking heavy influence from stereotypical American fraternity houses/house parties.
What methods/tools did you use to develop your game?
Cryptid Party was developed and programmed within the Unreal Engine 4, with digital illustrations created using Photoshop and animation using Adobe Premiere. When encountering any bugs during the programming, I would consider the ways in which I could achieve what I wanted through other means. However, when I felt that at my current level, I wouldn’t know what to do without being explicitly told, I requested the help of other students with more experience than me using the engine and would run through the issues and my ideas for potential fixes with them until we could work out how to solve them together.
What’s a feature you are proud of?
Personally, I’m happy with the implementation and use of billboarding sprites for the characters, foliage and background objects as I felt that It’s not something too common to see within modern gaming. I decided to make use of it as I had also been impressed by its use in other smaller indie titles and walking simulators, feeling as though its implementation would help my illustrations to really stand out amongst the environment.
On the other hand, I equally feel that the item grabbing/dropping mechanic was relatively impressive for me as it was the feature that was admittedly the most complex to program correctly.
What was a challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
A common example of an issue I had encountered whilst working on Cryptid Party was my constant need to keep balancing out the time I would spend working on the level, illustrations and the programming as focusing on one area for too long would mean it would become a little too bloated whilst others would suffer from a lack of content. As the project continued in development this problem was something I began overcoming by ensuring that as soon as I had finished implementing a feature that covered one of these areas, I would spend some time working on another area.
As your project comes to a close, any last remarks about your project or time at uni?
Throughout my time studying game design at both college and university, I had always planned to eventually work individually to produce something that would serve as a culmination of all my work beforehand. For this reason, being able to develop Cryptid Party from the ground up, all whilst putting the knowledge and techniques I learnt from previous projects to use has been extremely gratifying for me, I feel that this has in turn given me the confidence in my skills and only furthered drive to continue developing Cryptid Party alongside various similar projects like it beyond university.
On The Brink
On the Brink is a Binding of Isaac inspired twin-stick shooter where you play as Itto, a general service penguin bot, contracted to work for this massive Amazon-like megacorporation, Amity. Your ship has unfortunately been stranded in a scrapyard, and as the only functioning member of the crew, you have to ensure that the ship remains running as long as possible by defeating old-tech invaders, fixing damaged systems and doing whatever other menial tasks Amity wants you to do.
What inspired you?
Many, many things! The core combat and roguelike elements are definitely inspired by the indie gem, Binding of Isaac, spliced in with system management mechanics in the vein of FTL – the result of playing both at the same time and hypothesising what a merge between the two would look like. Outside of those, we’ve taken a lot of inspirations, both of us are huge sci-fi and dystopian fans so that genre played a huge part in it. Wall-E especially, we definitely were inspired by Wall-E’s hyper-consumerist world.
What methods/tools did you use to develop your game?
We wanted to focus on collaboration first and foremost – we are only two people so there’s not much opportunity to squirrel into a hole and emerge days later with everything completely made. Trello was our lifesaver (outside of general conversations and spamming Discord messages at 1 am) as we could easily track what each other was doing, and what tasks were ahead of us. As for the more typical development tools, On the Brink was built from the ground up on Gamemaker Studio: 2 and all art assets were made using the trusty iPad app, Procreate.
What’s a feature you are proud of?
Jay: The shop is the highlight for me personally. Gamemaker is not exactly geared towards UI design, so the satisfaction of getting something that looks really good and adds so much to the game, especially as a roguelike, is just an insanely proud moment for me.
Holly: Something I’m particularly proud of is being able to weave in the narrative through the use of pop-ups, forms and other interactive objects. While sometimes only a small moment, it’s been very gratifying to flesh out some of the broader world and be able to comment on issues that inspired the creation of the game in the first place.
What was a challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
Scope creep was one of the biggest ones. We had so many ideas for this project, and we started with a fairly ambitious idea for the timeframe we had, so having to minimise and prioritise the project was heart-breaking in some ways. Being realistic with ourselves during meetings, and focusing more on refining what we had over implementing feature upon feature was our lifesaver. If we hadn’t done that, I suspect we would have been extremely overwhelmed by the end of it all.
As your project comes to a close, any last remarks about your project or time at uni?
Jay: University has been an absolute godsend for me, in so many areas. I can visually see how much I’ve grown and adapted, not only practically, but as a person as well. I’m far less anxious now, that’s for sure! That, and the fact that I’ve been able to create a passion project has been insanely cool. If you told me three years ago that I would be making something like this, I would have not believed you. It’s just been a great experience all around, and I can’t wait to see where I go next.
Holly: While On the Brink has been the largest project I’ve worked on at university, I’ve been able to apply skills I’ve learned throughout the entire course. It’s been gratifying developing these skills on a project of this size, and working with incredible people on various things over the years. Endings are always bittersweet, but I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve gained and the friends I’ve made. Although this project may be coming to a close, I’m looking forward to starting and developing many new ones.
Thank you to Kyran Broadhurst for stepping in as sound editor for our video content!
Thank you to CCCU Game Design for letting us talk with them and show off their work, and for being so welcoming. Be sure to check out their itch.io page and Twitter to see their great work!
