Carnival Carnage

This was my 4th and final game project at TGA. It was by far the most hectic and fun couple of months I had during my time at the school.

This project started in turmoil. Our group had split in two before it, as an internal conflict had come to a head, right before its start. As such for this game, the group name changed to "Phoenix Bit".

At this point during the year we had solved most of our pipeline woes. I had worked with our graphics programmer to create a tool that simplified the texture pipeline. Rather than being a command line tool, we now had a proper GUI with a preview window to show an in-engine asset preview. We also had a suite of Maya tool scripts to help with regular tasks as well as model export. At this stage I began pushing to use Blender more in development.

In pre-production we scoped this project as realistically as we could. We knew that with a smaller team, and no Designers, we would have to use a new approach. That is why we chose to make a game that did not need much in the way of level design. We also knew our "real" development time would be more limited, as everyone was working on portfolios, and interviewing for internships during this time.

During the course of this project me and the other TA, John, picked up the slack in Art. We went from having 3 artists to 1. As both of us had a fair amount of art experience we could fill the void. I assisted in the creation of many of our environment art assets. It was fun automating as much of it as possible with Houdini, Substance Designer, and Blender. The most "tools" focused work I did for this project was a Houdini curve tool to place flag ropes in Maya.

This project also gave me a chance to nerd out about how to create our scoreboard. It involved a custom shader that changed the UV position of a plane to change the number displayed on it. I got the solution straight of out my earlier work recreating Halo weapons in the Source Engine.

We tried to implement destructibles in the engine for this game, as we wanted the boxes and barrels to break. However due to time constraints it was a feature we cut. It ended up far more complex to implement than we expected.

Out of the four projects I worked on over the course of the year, this was the most satisfying one. That is likely due to how well our team functioned, and how we playtested our game every week. With it being a couch coop-game, it made for great friday evening play sessions together.