March Break Flash Project

     So making video games. This is something that occupies a considerable amount of my time these days. That is of course because I am going to school to study just that. So the way my school operates is a little odd sometimes. One such oddity is that we periodically get what are called "lab weeks". Basically these are an excuse for the teachers to take the week off, but students are still required to do 20 hours of work for the week. So we get two options: either the teacher will assign us a project to do, or we can come in as normal and work on whatever we like. A chunk of my class chose the latter, and this is what came of it:


     We got this crazy idea that we should put our heads together and see what we can make collectively. We are done learning flash/AS3 at this point, but we figured we could make a much more visually appealing game if we went back there, since we are only working with the console right now in C++. Perhaps we could even put together a piece for our portfolios!

     So this is what we put together. It didn't end up quite as grand as we had hoped. Of course we only had one week, 20 hours of work time, to put it together, but we were also hoping on having about 7 people working on it. In the end of the day we ended up getting about 50 man hours instead of our projected 140. With that considered, I think it turned out pretty well. I didn't really learn a whole lot about coding, but I feel like being exposed to a bit larger scale project and coordinating work between a handful of different people was a valuable experience. I definitely learned how not to make a game this week.









     In the end of the day I'm still quite proud of what we managed to put out. It's still pretty buggy and we ended up scrapping more content than we actually put in the game. Almost none of our more grandiose ideas made it, but it was definitely a valuable and fun experience. If nothing else being a part of the brainstorming behind making this game was really fun. It's just too bad that the final product doesn't really do our vision justice.