The project has come to a close. We nailed our pitch and did the best we could for the playtesting session, but at the end of the day, Wands and Warheads was not chosen to go forward into the next semester. It's unfortunate. All that work we did to setup the game for success, and have it stopped before it can truly manifest. It was a long, fun trip, but it's one that ended before it was finished.
Wands and Warheads was originally made by accident. When the semester began our two potential games were a Guild Management Game and a Hardcore 2D Survival Game. As placeholder for the ranged weapons in the survival game our designer used a fireball effect, which was an unexpectedly huge hit in class. This led us to rethink our options and games, and from that came Wands and Warheads, which replaced the Guild Management Game.
For me this jump was a big switch. The Guild Management Game had been my piece of the conception phase, so it was hard to let go of. However, it would have been much harder to make work than Wands and Warheads, so it was ultimately the right decision, Once we chose Wands and Warheads to be our game going forward, I took over the map and navigation systems as my main focus, with little additions to other systems based on time and need. I also contributed to the art in the game in the form of spells and a few items.
Working on the map was an interesting graphical challenge. I had very few issues and bugs pop up that weren't graphical in nature, which is unfortunately my weakest area. I couldn't add a new feature to the map without the graphics bugging out in some way. It was also an interesting design challenge. I was left mostly alone to make the map as I please. As the game world was updated, so to was the map. However, I had to constantly reference John's plans to make sure I revealed enough info for the map to be useful, but not so much it was trivial to navigate and showed all the world's secrets. This eventually led to the balance of towns being marked while single houses were not. Since the map was so closely tied to John's work, I created the map with the intent of being easily adaptable. This worked well in the long run, since there was one week were the map was changed in some way almost everyday, and updating the map was simple since most it had handled most of it automatically.
There were certain key decisions we made this semester that pushed the game the direction it did. The biggest one was our decision to drop the Guild Manager and double down on the Survival Game with Wands and Warheads. Without that one decision, we would have ended up in a much different place, and I don't think the whole team would have been as happy with it as we are with Wands and Warheads. The next big decision is our switch from Fantasy Survival to Survival RPG. Originally Wands and Warheads was just a less punishing version of the Hardcore Survival Game with fantasy elements. This was a quick change in focus and a very easy one, but one that worked out very well and without it we could of had a very different game. It also helped differentiate the games and gave us a much more defined goal for Wands and Warheads. The last was our choice to move away from a most standard progression system and switch to an option based system. Instead of having certain weapons be better than others, they are balanced around specific playstyles. The high damage weapons carry much more risk compared to the lower damage weapons, in the form of resource use and how much you expose yourself to danger. This gave our combat a much more refined focus and made the game more fun. Being contained to a single level did make this choice easier and stronger weapons would have shown up down the line, but it would be sets of weapons instead of single ones, to keep that balance of playstyles.
Going forward into next semester, I've been placed on the team Superfluous Amounts of Spectacular. They're making Dan Shredder. While I plan to try and avoid the graphics side of things, I learned plenty about Unity shaders during the creation of my map that I could maybe apply to one of my tasks in the new team. I also learned plenty about working better with a team. We of Chimera Inc worked very well together, possibly the best team I've had in any production class, and as such I feel I learned more of what is the right way to work with others as opposed to other teams were I learned what not to do more than anything. I hope I can be a valuable asset to SAoS going forward and we make a damn good game.
