KNÖT - The story of our first Games Academy Project
Let's talk about our first semester game project at games academy. It's called "KNÖT", a 2D Puzzle platformer with Physics featuring a rolling main character. Sounds funny? It is! Here is the trailer:
This trailer was made by me and was released two weeks before the final game shipped. As soon as the we are allowed to upload the game, you'll be informed in this blog.
The Story
What is a Games Academy Project?
At Games Academy (Frankfurt, Germany), we study game development. I'm currently learning Game Design and we've got programmers and artists, too. Of course, Game Designers are the most important people for a game ;)
Each semester, we have to build and ship a complete game from the ground up. This semester, we started on December 6th (before this date we had school full time) and shipped the gold master on February 14th. The only requirements were it had to be a platformer or a 2d shooter. Pretty easy? Nope! We threw away our first idea on December 20th, so we had 6 weeks (plus one week school and one week vacation) to build this whole game.
Our team
We had three game designers, one programmer and one and a half artists to complete this task. (Despite being a nice guy, the half artist had kind of a non serious work ethics, so unfortunately he did not get as much done as he could). I took the job of being "team lead", which meant more work, solving problems in the team and keep the ship on course.
The Knöt Idea
Our first idea was a Castlevania like platformer which required lots of animation and programming work. This was a big problem considering our team had only one programmer and one and a half artists.
Two weeks into the project, the artists approached me and told me they could not complete the project in time. The same day (on the two hours train ride home I go on every day) I tried to come up with a new game idea we could complete with this team constellation.
The Game had to be easy to program, should not include too many graphic assets and should include a lot of content because I need to keep two game designers (and me) busy. The perfect game would consist of only one character, a ton of short levels and easy graphics. Perhaps something like a puzzle platformer with physics elements? Super Meat Boy meets Angry Birds? The Knöt Idea was born.
The Prototype
After the idea was there, I had to get everyone excited about a game with only one character and some stuff to push around. I decided to start my text editor and code a prototype in Javascript (Canvas) because it was easy, fast, and I knew how to code javascript due to my five years experience as a freelance web developer.
The next morning, I presented the first prototype to my fellow team members. The three levels I built were easy to master but included all the aspects of the final game: a rolling main character who grows by eating meat, physics puzzle and the fast completion of the levels. For the physics aspects, I used Box2D, a very easy but powerful physics engine ported in almost any programming language.
The team agreed on changing our game to the Knöt idea after playing the three prototype levels. They liked the fast paced gameplay and the idea of having a rolling main character.
The Progress
Our programmer had a few long nights hacking together a first playable version of KNÖT (then known as project asgard). We did it with XNA and Farseer Physics, a XNA port of Box2D. Because of the similarities, I tried to help with coding (and I hope I did *g*). In the first week of January, our first alpha version was ready and the game designers began to crank out levels.
Roughly every two weeks we had a milestone review where we had to show our progress made in the two weeks and present two tasks each team member did alone. We then got feedback from the committee (our teachers at Games Academy) and went back to work again.
A typical implementation cycle of an idea was:
- Someone had an idea to add an element to a level, like ropes, trampolines or switches.
- He asked me (or I was asking myself) if the new element be a good addition to the project or the distraction and the amount of work was too high.
- Usually, I said yes (which meant more work, yeah...).
- We ask our programmer if there was a way to put this in.
- He usually said yes (poor guy).
- Then we went to our artist, telling him we needed some new graphics.
- He usually cursed and said yes :)
- After the programmer and the artist were done, the game designers started to fiddle around with the new element trying to make something useful.
- The one who got the idea usually cursed the most about it later.
- A new idea came by and the cycle started all over again.
We did not build an editor for our game designers, every level of KNÖT is hand made by putting together a lot of objects and tons of x and y coordinates.
Because two game designers are enough to crank out levels, I did not build the levels full time (I did about 20 of the final 73 levels) but rather tried to build everything else which was not covered yet. My work includes the ingame interface design, the music and the website displaying our online scores.
Online Scores?
Yes, KNÖT is a competitive game! After building the game for a while, I realised it was fun but we needed something to keep the players playing a level multiple times to beat something. We included three medals a player could get by beating the level in a specific amount of time. I think the gold medal times are a bit too hard and only for the pro gamers, but that‘s ok.
After completing the medals, I created a new feature for KNÖT: Online rankings. Of course I copied this feature from other games like Trackmania, but it is essential for keeping the player playing. You want to compare yourself with others, so an online scoring system is better than nothing.
We created a pretty easy and (hopefully) save score transmission system and added user accounts to KNÖT. Players now could upload their scores from every computer KNÖT was installed (and connected to the internet).
The Gold Master
On February 14th, we had our gold master date. A hint to everyone planning to build a game: the more content you put in, the more you have to test. On this day, we tested with half of the team fixing the last problems and finishing the level order.
Our presentation was very easy: first we showed the trailer, then went through the powerpoint presentation (required by the rules, only 9 pages and done in 2 minutes) and finally took one of the committee members, put the xbox controller (the game features controller and keyboard input, but controller is a better) in his hands and let him play. After he played for a while, we did the „Steve Jobs One More Thing“ thing and showed them the working online rankings with the times the player just uploaded in the background.
Of course there were negative things, which is normal if you build a game in six weeks. Not everything was polished enough and the some levels could be better with more time at hand, but we are very pleased with the game and I hope you are, too, as soon as we can release it on www.knoet.de.
What I learned doing the project:
First: You don‘t have to crunch if you plan your game right. You can crunch as much as you like, but you should not pressure yourself for a college project. There is so much more important stuff going on in your life :)
Second: You cannot program a Call of Duty clone in six weeks with a five man team and almost no experience. Don‘t try. Choose something you can!
Third: People come for the graphics but stay for the fun. You will sell units because of the graphics (Crysis 2 anyone?) but if players think your game is boring, that sucks. The fun should be your main concern, especially as a game designer it is crucial to the success of a project.
Fourth: You can build a game, don‘t build a tech demo. A game should contain content, and even in six weeks, there is enough time to build a good game if everyone in the team cares about the project and understand the idea (you have to have a good idea in the first place, though).
Fifth: You are making games! Damn that is great!
Ok, the fifth point was a bit personal, but I really enjoyed the project and think the next semester project will also be a good one. In the meantime, I am sitting at home, reading books about game design, working as a web developer to pay the bills and doing javascript game development. More on that in another post.
Features
To end this post, a short list of Knöt game features:
- a rolling hero
- physics puzzles
- three different environments
- an epic story
- self created music
- online rankings
- 73 level including an endboss fight against the „Bratpfannenfrau“ (frying pan woman)
- and over 8 hours of gameplay!!!!
If you have any questions about KNÖT, the project, game design, the games academy or if you can hire me (yes you can *g*), leave a comment or mail me at thomas@dievolution.net.
Rock on!
