The Inevitable Death of Captain Oblivious! (2009)

“The Inevitable Death of Captain Oblivious!”

 

“Captain Oblivious” is the worlds greatest super nerd, and it is his goal to get to the most awesome comic book convention ever! Unfortunately for him the world is a dangerous place to live in, and he has a habit of becoming distracted and thus is a bit…oblivious of surroundings. Play as the “Hand of Fate!” and manipulate the world to try to stop captain oblivious from being killed in any number of gruesome manners, but remember…death is inevitable.

To download a copy of the game simply click the following link, (Flash player required) http://www.mediafire.com/?wcm2mcigkmi

Brief

“The Inevitable Death of Captain Oblivious” was the result of my second year group project module. The goal of the module was to work with a team of artists over a three month period to create a proof of concept demo for a simple Flash game.

My Roles

• Programming: The group of artists I was assigned had very little experience using Adobe’s Flash, including crucial areas such as using Actionscript (the principle coding language for flash) and just how to go about setting up a game. As a result since I was the only one with programming experience, I was responsible for all the coding and interactivity present in the demo.

• Team Leading: The team consisted of myself (A Games Design and Production Management student) and six students from the Computer Arts course at Abertay. The team decided that they wanted me to lead the group as I was the most qualified in the realms of organisation and management. The main duties attached to this were organising group meetings, creating and maintaining a schedule, keeping an in-depth production diary and trying to keep things running smoothly.

•  Gameplay and Level Design: I came up with the concept for the game and worked with the team to flesh it out to the stage where we were all on the same page and could create the demo. I was also responsible for placing all the gameplay assets in the game to create an environment and creating the puzzles.

• Audio Creation: As the only person with any experience engineering any form of audio for use in-game I was also tasked with this job.

Success

By the end of the project we had a fully working good-looking proof of concept demo. I presented it to the other groups and lecturers and it received positive feedback. All in all I would call it a mighty good success.

Lessons Learned

1.  ”Careful what you take on”: While the project was a success, it came at a great personal expense, mostly due to my own folly. As the project continued I found myself accepting more and more responsibility for more and more aspects of the project. The team leading and programming alone would have kept me more than busy, but I also found myself having to spend a great deal of time altering gameplay assets that were submitted to me before they were capable of being used in game. This resulted in countless late nights that could have been avoided had I allocated one artist to collating and quality checking gameplay assets before they were given to myself, or had I tasked one of the artist with the management side of things.
2. “Lay down your conventions and make them available”: In the initial design phase I spoke to the group about certain conventions that I would base the programming on, how large the average character is, how many frames per second the game would run at etc. Unfortunately the majority of the group did not take this on board when I said it or their memories were not so good when we reached production. This resulted in a lot of confusion and time being wasted as some work had to be altered or re-created due to convention issues. This problem could be easily avoided in future projects by writing a simple document that outlines the conventions in black and white. The document should also be made available to all the group members so there can be no confusion.
3. “Motivating students is hard!”: While I can’t speak for every student out there, if my experience on this project has taught me one thing it’s that students can be a nightmare to motivate and manage. Students simply have so much going on they regard as important that encouraging them to stick to any form of schedule or deadlines is a task fraught with exasperation and disappointment. Unfortunately there is no real way of disciplining a student like you would in a real company. If a member of staff were to not turn up to 60% of the mandatory meetings then show up on deadline day with sub par work I can guarantee you that they won’t be seeing any christmas bonus that year, if they have their job at all by that stage. But as a student trying to lead other students you simply have no power, making it a very difficult task indeed.