Throughout the past year, Screw the Nut has developed Some Assembly Required – a demo level of a robot platform game. Working with the BBC and as part of our university courses we had 11 weeks to spend on getting our group together, research and design the game, followed by 10 weeks of development. For almost everyone on the ten-member team, this was the first opportunity to build a project as part of a group.
Here you can see brief highlights of the game, an introductory video, our early progress, some animation clips, and finally a full walk-through of the demo.
Technical Stuff
The game was programmed in C++ using the Ogre engine, using PhysX through the NxOgre plugin for physics.
An iterative development approach (Scrum) was employed which helped us prioritise the work to be done as our deadlines moved, plugins failed and we balanced our time between various classes. This also helped us reflect on our development style at the end of each of our sprints, letting us improve on a weekly basis rather than simply looking back after the project completed.
As we picked up tasks according to priority rather than specialising into dedicated areas like graphics or physics programming like all members of the team I worked on a range of areas of the product, such as the initial framework and entity manager, moving platforms and physics callbacks.
The Team
- Code: Ian Copland, Philipp Geyer, Andrew Glass, Kieran McGrory, and Me!
- Art: Ross Catto, Thomas Finlay.
- Audio: Daniel Zamorano.
- Production: Ross Gourlay, Paul Hastie.
Controls
The game is designed to be played with an Xbox 360 joypad, however it is also possible to play with a keyboard.
Character control – Left analogue stick or WASD keys
Camera control – Right analogue stick or cursor keys with “C” key to reset
Interact with vending machines – X button or alt key
Switch arm (once you gained that power) – Y button or ctrl key
Jump (once you’ve gained that power) – A button or space key
Return to a checkpoint – Left bumper or “R” key
Switch to first person view – Right bumper
Files
- Download and install the demo level for Windows. You will also need to install PhysX System Software.
- Watch the videos on Youtube
the game looks like it is coming along nicely. i like the FX on the pickups and platforms
Thanks
One of the great things about the Ogre engine was how easily you could add different particle systems and effects, so we were able to spend a lot of time working on the gameplay mechanics and still get the game to look nice in the end.