Lane Casters - Game and Interactive Media Projects
For my university’s MI 495 class, I was assigned to work with a group of artists, designers, musicians, and programmers on a game project. For ideation we all got the chance to pitch a game idea, and once we had decided on our concept we had three milestones to show considerable progress and finish with a full fledged project.
After some ideation, our team settled on a game project about bowling with fantasy elements, involving special pins, bowling balls, and obstacles that randomly dot the lane. Throughout the duration of this project I served as the lead programmer, tasked with creating the main gameplay loop, a role which I would follow through with over the three month development process. While I was well used to programming games at this point, the real challenge was coordinating with the other programmers and designers- executing the vision of dedicated designers can be a great challenge, and working with other programmers whose styles and organization you might not be used to is also quite the learning curve to get used to.
While programming this game, I studied different types of bowling rules sets, working with designers to best represent the type of game they envisioned, and had to create a modular system for the varying pins, obstacles, and abilities that populated the game. While functions like menus or basic systems involving spawning and scoring were handled by my teammates, I handled the behaviors of the different pins, the game’s physics and collisions, and some of the more technical systems, like file saving and settings. Throughout the three milestones that our class set out for us, we managed to keep up and set realistic goals for ourselves that yielded a project that I am very proud of now.