Postmortem & Demo of our game

TopuReza · June 02, 2004 05:53 PM

Hello Pls download the demo & Bonus level at www.trimatrik.com/download.htm This game was developed by mainly a four member gamedev team. It was our first attempt & fortunately we got an angel Investor. So We were enough enthusiastic to make the next unreal :-) This post examines at least how far We reached in a four month time & a $3k development budget... Regarding the game design, I feel no shame to state that - It is a clone of unreal tournament. I think the unreal approach was a plus for us . We could not take the risk of an innovative design as we had no experience. We just took a proven game design , although we make a new gametype which is a mixing of Capture the flag & Domination. Actually the challange lied in the making of a good localized clone. Regarding the engine, The financer had not allotted any budget for a good middleware. So the game used Our own game engine ''trimatrik''. It is not superb but can be compete with some other proven engines like truevision or garagegames. It uses our own formats for the level & character data which is exported from 3ds max using our plugins. Regarding the language, The one thing that is special about the game is - the entire game is written in Visual Basic 6. It is not meant that we cant develop in C++. But We Had chosen VB over C++ for its productivity & Simplicity as we had to work on a tight,limited dead line. However we lost some performances for this. Regarding Tools, We used 3ds max as our primary asset development tool. Although our engine supports quake bsp format, but our artists preferred 3ds max over these quake/half-life tools. So we had to enhance the plugin exporters to encompass the max 5''s lightmap & vertex lighting features. We also had to develop some polygon editing/uv mapping tools for productivity. We also designed a Ai path maker tool. To do ''entity placement'' & ''ai testing'' more easily, We made an entity Editor. These tools development phase ate up a lot of time in the budget. Regarding Modability, The game has a good mod architecture. In perspective of programming two types of modding is possible. one is - It is an Activex exe. So it exposes the automation interfaces of the runtime game objects. second is - through the vbs/jscript support which is built in the engine. In perspective of Art asset, Any new character & level addition is also very easy. just make in max, export,place entities & leave it in the ''levels'' folder of the game. Regarding AI, The Ai code base was good. But we could not furnice it to make more attractive. earlier levels are suffering from poor design/ai path placement. And the fact is - u have nothing to do with a superb ai code if every element do not perfectly well arranged. Regarding Cinematic, We make a 1.5 minute startup cinematic using the machinima technique & then doing some video editing staffs to make it more emotional. [The cinematic is not included in the demo for size reducing but a machinima toolbar can be found by running the game in window mode & pressing the f10 key.] Regarding Multiplayer ability, The game has no multiplayer ability. Although it was planned at first And the ''game design'' also makes it easy to implement. But we could not include it at the end for lack of time. We planned to use DirectPlay. However, we got a lot of experiences from our first project not only regarding the Development but also in Team management. Now pls let me know does the demo look worth of this 4 months development. And can we be able to get publishers for our future small to mid level projects :-) With Best regards Topu Reza www.trimatrik.com