As you may previously have read, this year my team “Screw The Nut” has been working on a 3D platform game through the BBC’s prototype project and the University of Abertay Dundee, “Some Assembly Required”. Our final hand-in to the BBC is tomorrow so I thought I’d take this time to build a little suspense before I share the final game-play videos and let you see a few screenshots.

The game itself sees Warran T. Void, a lost and damaged little robot, wake up alone in a factory. By collecting new parts from vending machines he can rebuild himself with new abilities, allowing him to overcome obstacles and progress through the game. Our prototype level introduces you to a pair of suspicious character who instruct you to climb a giant construction robot and collect pickups for them, and playing as the naive Warran you enthusiastically oblige.

These are all taken within the last week as we built our level and did some final testing. It’s been really awesome to see our game go from a series of platforms on a plane into a full, playable prototype level as it was only recently that we were able to bring all our art assets and platforming sections together into one application. As you can see, we went a little overboard with bloom, particle effects and shiny things however our actual focus throughout development has been on gameplay mechanics and the physics behind this.

The game was implemented over a period of two and a half months, that’s ten week-long development iterations, following on from general story and game-play designs we worked on late last year. A lot has changed from our original ideas – in particular splitting the BBC’s “interactive narrative” brief into two parts consisting of this game and a separate research project – but we’ve kept the core mechanics and level in tact.

The team itself consists of ten third-year students: five programmers including myself, two artists, two producers and a sound engineer. We also had the assistance of programmers from the BBC, and a mentor from Real Time Worlds. This made a huge difference to the project in terms of organisation and development and keeping on track, as well as handling technical problems with our codebase, and (at least as far as I’m concerned) has given us far more experience to carry over to our future projects than we would have gained on our own.

So, fingers crossed for our demo tomorrow and our showcase later in the term (which I believe is open to the public, more details will follow if that’s the case) and hopefully we’ll have a final video prepared for you soon.