Game Project Development Summary

After eight months of development, a somatosensory camera-based game was finally completed. The game type is similar to the game where Lehman rabbit washes clothes in the Wii, and relies on the somatosensory camera to recognize player movements to operate the game. The entire development process is certainly not smooth. Now is a good time to review this development process, because many of the feelings and memories related to the project are still very clear, after a long time, those painful feelings will be forgotten, and the suffering is the place where we need to seriously reflect, so that we can play a positive role in promoting future development.

 

Project Team Member

This game project is a standalone casual game, so the staffing is very limited.ProgramOne person, three artists, and one planner. One UI artist and two 3D artists are responsible for scenes, models, and actions. Of course, only programs are invested full-time, and other personnel also take into account the development of other projects. Members are all colleagues with considerable work experience.

 

Project Plan

In terms of scale, it is not a complex project, so we naively thought it should be completed within three months at the beginning of the project, but now it takes several times more time. The development of game projects is not similar to the development of general applications. As long as there is no problem with the implementation of functions, the game project does not actually have the concept of "completion" in the true sense, because you can improve the game without restrictions, so that the game has a better picture, better feel, richer content, more beautiful music and sound effects, and so on. The only limit is your budget.

So when we first calculated the workload, we made a mistake and made an execution plan based on the functional points. For example, level management systems, item management systems, and character management systems are abstracted from game plans. It seems that all these things have been completed after the game, but in fact there are too many things not included in it. In addition, some seemingly simple functions last took a lot of time to achieve good results. For example, in this project, it takes more than two weeks for a person to take the clothes up and put down, it is several times longer than the estimated time. Of course, the simple water-and-water effect is still good, But here "suitable" means that it is very difficult to perfectly match the movements and styles of the characters in the game.

 

Technologies used

In terms of technology, I 'd like to open a single article later.ArticleHere, we will simply list the technologies used. Thanks to the accumulation of previous projects, we mainly used a set of tools based on open-source engines and libraries, and built our own game engine based on these tools, so we will also use this set of items in this project. It mainly includes the Ogre Renderer, cegui interface library, Lua script library, bullet physical library, the particle library of the participant universe, the openni somatosensory library, and the openal sound-effect library.

Some people can see why they don't use the more popular udk, unity3d, and other engines. Aren't those engines more mature and powerful. In fact, I also had this idea before, because after reading the examples provided by those udk engines, I thought it was really great. But I also asked a lot of friends who use these engines. Many people say that they are not as good as they think. Good results: various advanced rendering technologies are used, but whether the engine's original rendering capabilities are fully reflected depends on the skill of art. The same is true in terms of functions. It takes a long time to master such a huge engine. Small teams like ours should avoid using such heavyweight tools. Just like the above-mentioned special water and flower effects, if you cannot split the imaginary water and flower effects into elements such as what art resources are needed, what particle transmitters are needed, and the influencer, even high-end tools cannot be used. In addition, I think that people are more important than tools. Even if there are good tools and no one can control them, it is useless.

 

Errors in project development

It is very sad that there are far fewer mistakes in doing the right thing in projects. In this section, we want to analyze and analyze errors, and try to avoid them in future development.

Design Error

This is one of the most lethal mistakes in project development. To put it bluntly, it means that the gameplay concept is not fun after the game prototype is created, so you can modify the gameplay. This means that a lot of work has been done before. Unfortunately, during the entire project cycle, we experienced a change in gameplay, resulting in a considerable amount of logic.CodeAnd art resources are abolished together.

In fact, the gameplay should still be available in the initial design phase, otherwise there will be no need to start, but it is difficult to clarify why it is not fun at the end. I have encountered the problem of modifying the gameplay several times in my previous development experience, and sometimes it will overturn several rounds at one point. After thinking about it, I think this may not be simply a strange way of playing. Many games are simple to watch, however, the reason why it is fun depends on the help of other factors, such as the image setting, sound feel, and sound effects.

Therefore, I think some methods of being overturned may actually be killed by mistake. This is because the game was rough before it was completed, and there was a lack of good pictures, feel, music, sound effects and special effects. There was no way for us to fully evaluate the gameplay. For example, it may be boring for you to control a few people in blocks to hit many other people in blocks, but you can replace the characters with Zhang Fei or Guan Yu to match them with ambitious scenes, beautiful music, good sound effects, and dazzling special effects, you will feel very enjoyable. This is because the Three Kingdoms are unparalleled. However, it is impossible to play games without effects. In fact, these factors can be combined perfectly to create a fun game. Just like a movie that lacks excellent storylines and has only a Luxury cast and perfect effects, it cannot be regarded as a good movie after all.

However, this is just my experience. After all, I am not dedicated planning and cannot analyze the problem of gameplay from the theoretical level. However, you must be careful when selecting and adjusting the gameplay during future development. It is best to quickly build a prototype system to verify the gameplay.

Technical error

This problem is mostly caused by the program itself. Because programmers are not comfortable with the status quo after all, they always want to keep pace with the times, transform the existing architecture, and introduce new technologies. However, these are both risks for the project and are high risks. I suffered a loss in this project, but there was no major problem at the end.

The cause of this problem is the script. Previously we introduced the Lua script in the project, but it was not very in-depth. However, it is common to use scripts in games, so we also feel that scripts should be integrated into our projects. At this time, the programmer's spirit is coming. We can't be worse than others, so we decided to introduce scripts in the project and made this decision when the project progress was halfway through. As a result, the program architecture was significantly changed, and a considerable amount of code written in C ++ was switched to script implementation. The final result is a significant increase in the workload, because many functions of C ++ have been implemented, and changed to a script to re-translate and sort it out.

In addition, changing the development language from the best C ++ to Lua is doomed to a problem. To be proficient in a strange language, you must practice it in depth. The more you use it, the more experienced you are. Therefore, the cost is that the project restructures all the scripts written in the early stage. These technical details are not described here. In the future, you will have the opportunity to write another article about script practice. In that case, people are much more important than tools. Even if there are good tools and no one can control them, they are useless. No matter how many advanced tools you use, there are great risks if you are not familiar with the introduction of the project.

PS: we also have a larger project. We introduced scripts during the development process. Because the original program was too complex, we terminated the introduction of the script in the middle, and finally only a few modules introduced the script, it has a bad impact on the development and maintenance of the project.

 

Summary

From the perspective of the project, we realized the initial idea and achieved the expected goal. However, from the gaming perspective, this is not necessarily a good game. There are still many deficiencies in both the picture and the gameplay. Of course, some of these deficiencies are affected by the budget, so I leave some regrets. However, for the team, it is a real-shot experience that allows everyone to go through a complete and unique game development process. This has accumulated valuable experience for future development.