Overview

As part of a student group composed of artist, programmers, sound engineers and directors a prototype game was created. The prototype was created following a brief supplied by Chunk Games. The brief had one very specific and interesting rule which was “Absolutely no text or dialogue may appear in your game!”. Along with this the brief specified that an emphasis should be put on storytelling rather gameplay which left myself and the other programmers the interesting task of creating game mechanics which enhanced the story telling of the project. The prototype game was nominated for a Bafta Ones to Watch award. While unreleased the game was tested and built for iPad.

Description

Constructs is a puzzle adventure game where the player has crashed landed on an alien planet while trying to escape a sun that is going super nova. The players objective is to escape the ensuing firey inferno by building another ship. Unfortunately the player is quite frail and weak so he builds a robot to help with the heavy lifting. The prototype is a short story about the adventures and relationship between the robot and alien.

Contribution

During this project I worked on gameplay and engine elements. My engine work consisted of: handeling input from the touch device, developing user interface elements, developing a state machine to handel creation of levels and menus, collsion detection and incorporate sound. My gameplay work consisted of: programming the alien and the robot, logic and creation of the puzzles (including working on multiple iterations of the logic), collision response and level constuction. I also did a large amount of debugging including solving issues on areas I had not coded myself.

I also was actively involved in the design process and contributed to the style, feel and gameplay of the game. Due to the size of the team I worked on practically every area of the game and enjoyed doing so.

Details

Category	Details
Software used	Visual Studio, TortoiseSVN, Assembla
Framework/libraries used	Marmalade, DirectX
Platform	iPad
Language(s) used	C++