Why

This game was made during a five week long course that focused on developing a prototype and to develop a design document.

What did we want to achieve

Our vision was to make a playable level long prototype. The full game would have influences of “The lost vikings” but with collectibles and with a variation of goals to clear the levels and unlockable characters to choose from when playing the levels a second time.

Game description

A humorous puzzle game where the player must help a group of comic characters who live in a mobile home with dreams of becoming superheroes. The game is about helping the group through missions that they get from the true super heroes like Batman or Wonder Woman. Assignments can vary from buying hot dogs for Wonder Woman to help find the Phantoms lost ring. As the team advance through the levels they build up trust with the true super heroes and get better and more important assignments. The environments in the levels varies depending on the superhero that the mission comes from. Batman levels are set in Gotham City-inspired environments, and the Phantoms has more jungle-inspired levels.

My role

The team was made up by seven team members divided in two groups, two members was working with the graphic design and the other five were programmers, I were a part of the later group. I made the code used to play sound effects and music and parts of all other code. I also wrote a big part of the GDD.

Choice of game engine

Since it was a criteria from the Course leader was that the prototype was made in Flash using Actionscript it were a easy choice.

Description of work process

We had a running schedule which days everyone would be in school and then we divided the workflow from day to day.

What problems did we encounter and what did we do to solve them

When we implemented the level in its whole and the avatars had to much distance between them the ones not selected by the player stops checking for collision and fell down through the ground, we had short time before deadline and had to cut half the level. The other big problem we encountered were the synchronization in multiplayer, our first approach was to send what buttons the client clicks but since it used UDP there became inconsistancy, so we decided to try and send the coordinates of the client but then no sound and animations get transferred and the gaming experience were badly hurt, this sadly made us giving up the multiplayer part, its still there though, since it was a demand from the course leader.

What went bad

Actionscript was very different to Java and C++, it did a lot of things that we couldn't´t control, this took some getting used to and that probably resulted in why we couldn't´t solve our problems better. Resource management. We were five programmers and two designers making a lot of pressure on the designers while we didn’t have as much to do.

What went good

Planning, We had meetings three times a week and made schedule one week in advance. Extreme programming. First time I tried this and it worked great, learning from your fellow students and making better code as a result. The group worked good together. I´m most satisfied that the humor we thought out transferred pretty good into the game.

Download the League of Fail prototype (Flash)
Click here for more information about some of the heroes
Credits:
Mikael Lyck
Karl Dahlgren
Fredrik Dahlgren-Öhman
Sofia Häggvik
Nicklas Norddahl
Kristoffer Nordkvist
Camilla Nyberg

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