Sheridan College hosts a biannual sprint week where students of the BA Game Design program are placed into random teams filled with students of every year.
The teams are given five days to build a game and the winners are given bragging rights.
Team: Jessica Zhang, Liana Valdez, Harry Pitts, Riley Jackson, Justin San Juan
Role: Game Designer & Programmer
Theme: Alt.Ctrl
Timeline: 5 Days
When first introduced to the theme Alt.Ctrl and after being assigned a random team we realized that none of us have ever worked on or heard of the term Alt.Ctrl.
We learnt that Alt.Ctrl was a controller that deviated from the standard through either shape, size and input registration.
To create our physical controller we rented out a MakeyMakey which worked very well for rapid prototyping.
When we finished our main mechanic and were testing the game we noticed that a lot of players were following the ingredient list but not in order.
This was an issue because the customer would not accept the finished order because it wasn’t in the correct order.
We only found this issue when we asked people to play test the game with a day left until the end of sprint week.
After considerations we decided to remove the ingredient placement order and this lead to a much smoother game flow and players could focus on speed and having fun.
We had no animator on our team but we wanted to provide feedback for the player.
With the simple mechanics done I could focus on polishing up and adding a visual tell for the progress of the order.
I used the Unity animator to move the camera, ingredients, cooking utensils and customers.
This turned out better than I thought and really brought the game together.
We wanted a way to make the player feel immersed in the game but we we’re unsure of how.
We ended up using a FPS camera hybrid this influenced our narrative because it allowed us to treat the player as a new recruit.
We also mimicked the placement of the ingredients so that the physical controller was a representation of the digital table.
With both of these elements people got really immersed and we had tons of people play multiple times to beat their high scores or the high scores of their friends.
With random teams there will be an uneven distribution of people and their specialties. The team I joined ended up only having me work on the digital game because my team members were a year or more under me and were just starting to lean Unity in the course.
I knew right away that the workload was gonna be pretty high so I asked the team to scope the project to something small so that we could add their artistic and creative talents to the games design. Through art assets, design considerations and creation of the physical controller.
We ended up creating a cooking game beat the clock kind of style game which ended up great! With the simple mechanic being the core we could focus on polish which helped us win the award for Most Polished Game.
We were invited to showcase our game at LevelUp at one of Sheridan’ available booths this coming April 2019.
We were approached to showcase our game at the Hand Eye Society Ball late 2019 for their theme of cooking games.
We were approached by Sheridan to showcase our game at open house to represent our course Bachelor of Game Design.
It was a fun experience getting to work in random teams. I got to learn about people in the same program but years under me as well as work on a project with a full week of dedication.
