Why

The game was developed during a five week long course with focus on 3D engines where we had three weeks to develop a game.

What did we want to achieve

We wanted to learn UDK because we all felt that it would be a good experience when getting out into industry.

Game description

Guide Zeddie a alien made up in a boys fantasy world. Zeddie has crashed on Earth, far from his alien family. It is up to you to guide him past the everyday obstacles, as Zeddie is only about two inches tall, everyday objects and environments form interesting and unexpected obstacles that he must overcome.

My role

Since we all were programmers and a rather big team consisting of five members. Two of the members were experienced with Unreal editor we decided to let them implement the unreal scripts and we(the other three) concentrated on 3D modelling and texturing. I made the microwave oven, the cereal box, the snuff package and the flour bag.

Choice of game engine

The proposals from the course leader was to develop using Adobe Director, Unity, Ogre or UDK. Our group decided that we wanted to learn something that is widely used in the industry and therefor choose between UDK and Unity. UDK is more powerful, it was at that time just released to the public and we had two members of the team that said they were quite experienced using the Unreal editor. While we felt that Unity is less powerful, used mostly by Indie developers and none of the team had experience with Unity. This resulted in us choosing UDK.

Description of work process

We had a 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

The greatest problem that we came across, were that we couldn't peel away everything that is given in UDK, leaving us with feet left on our avatar that don look anything that we wanted and that some sound were left, for example when the player jumps. This come to our attention way to late leaving the group not capable of resolving it in time for the deadline.

What went bad

We underestimated the complication or we overestimated the expertise of our members in UnrealScript, UDK had just been released and there was not enough documentation out there for us to create the game we wanted. The other bad thing was the amount of graphics we created, we should have made a game with less graphics so we could focus on the code since we were only programmers in the group. I had a suggestion of a maze game for children when we were brainstorming game ideas I thought and still think this would have been a much better game for us, it would not demanded much graphics and we all could have been coding so not all the code where made of 1-2 persons leaving the rest of us in the dark until it was to late to fix the game leaving it as a tech demo of sorts.

What went good

Except for the avatars feet poping up beneth him from time to time I really liked the graphics, the whole kitchen got together beautiful. The sound effects were great, we decided we wanted to make all effects using our mouths and the result is pretty good considering. The heat effect over the oven when its on is nice even though someone who don’t know it is there probably won’t see it.

Credits:
Mikael Lyck
Karl Dahlgren
Aleksandar Jankovic
Jean-Pierre Siyoufian
Frank Wennerdahl