Radical Games: Conference Project Post-Mortem — MILA

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Mila is a top-down 2D RPG about a young girl’s search for a connection with her estranged father, and her slow disillusionment with the world her father is a part of. I’ve struggled a lot through the development of this game, and presently I am on a second or third draft of the art and maps. Functionally the game supports blendtree animation for movement, moving between scenes/maps, and collision. I spent a great deal more time than I expected to on the art, which is how I ended up with multiple drafts of nearly every asset and map. Because of this, the time I was able to spend on code suffered. I was able to make my game semi-playable, even with the amount of time I spent on the art.

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The process of the dev cycle helped me realize how well my background in design and visual art aided me in the process of game design. Although I was unable to spend as much time on it as I wanted to, I was also able to pick up on the logic of the code easily and quickly. I have a much better fundamental understanding of it now, and my skills in and understanding of animation grew a lot over the course of working on the character animations for this game. I’d like to continue to hone my understanding of abstraction and representation in art and animation, and to build my code vocabulary.

During this project my greatest difficulty was scaling and rescaling the scope of the story. I began with a potential plot that was way too large to create within one semester – the fact that I spent the first few weeks of the semester working on and sketching out this plot (and then rescaling it when I realized it was unrealistic) lost me precious time that I could have put into making the game more functional.

The coursework and materials gave me a lot of ideas about the functionality of a game, and the ways in which a game can get ideas across. I feel that I was able to incorporate a lot of ideas about shape theory and color theory, as well as taking design inspiration from a couple of top-down RPGs we played in the course, particularly Undertale and Suits: A Business RPG. I also took a lot of inspiration from Mortis Ghost’s OFF, which we did not play in class, but which I feel uses a minimalistic top-down format to create a very immersive and real-feeling world. It was also very helpful for me to see what my classmates were working on, as it gave me inspiration and motivation as well as reminding me that there is more than one successful way to make a game in the same code box.

I certainly feel that I could have budgeted the time I spent working on code better on this project. I do feel that the amount of time I spent on art was warranted, as I will likely be able to reuse assets from this game in the future. On future projects I would definitely try to allow myself more time in the beginning of the cycle to focus on art before delving into the code.

Author: Casper Sutton-Fosman