Another constraint was that out of the 30 or so people left on the King Basil team (some dropped out due to other commitments), only four of them were in the Advanced Games class. The other 26 students just volunteered whatever free time they had to the project.
This meant that ambitious features like more levels and a local multiplayer mode — another goal Taylor told me about in December — couldn’t make it into the final version of the game.
“That was a pipe dream! Aw, man,” said Taylor. “It’s funny. We thought it was going to be crazy and our lead engineer came to us in the first two weeks of the semester and said, ‘It’s done guys. I built it.’ And we looked at it, and it worked. But it looked terrible. And we realized we were not gonna have enough time to make that look beautiful.”
Plans after graduation
With most of the senior staff graduating, including Taylor (Drake is already an alumni), the future of King Basil’s Quest is up in the air. They have the whole story written down on paper, but the demo only has the tutorial and the first of three acts. Taylor told his team that they have to take it one step at a time. When the madness around finals and graduation finally settles down, they’ll reconvene to discuss what’s next.
“But it’s so sad because a lot of people are gonna leave,” said Taylor. “It’s just starting to hit me now as we reach the end of Demo Day. Like, I’m done. It’s kind of a strange feeling. I don’t know how to describe it.”
Howie and Yarla
Above: I’d run from that monster, too.
What is it?
Howie and Yarla is a top-down action game about a boy (Howie) and the sentient creature that grew out of him (Yarla) on his 16th birthday. This horribly confusing discovery also coincides with a giant portal to the demon world appearing in Howie’s high school. Together, Howie and Yarla have to defeat the monsters by biting, throwing, and eating them.
How it changed
In December, game director Colin Horgan said his team wanted a tight and polished 40-minute experience by the end of the school year. The spring demo actually exceeded their expectations. It had double the content the fall version had and multiple levels for players to explore. The young devs spent this past semester fleshing out the story and adding new enemies and levels.
But the last five months wasn’t enough to include everything they wanted. Ideally, the demo would’ve had a third area and a proper ending. Still, Horgan was proud of what his team accomplished.
“This isn’t just a student project anymore. That’s been in line with our goals from the beginning,” he said. “We wanted to make a game that people would want to play, not just people at USC. Allowing ourselves that freedom — It’s OK if we don’t make a full student project. I’d rather make an incomplete game than a complete student game, if you get what I’m saying.”
Challenges the team faced
The developers spent a lot of time making sure the mechanics felt right, so the brunt of Howie and Yarla’s improvements came from the design side. They adjusted the control scheme and simplified the combat to make it easier for players. At least they think it’s easier. Horgan said it’s hard to judge because they’ve become pretty good at playing their game.
Plans after graduation
Howie and Yarla is losing much of its creative talent, including Horgan. They want to finish and release the title eventually, but they aren’t sure yet how that’ll happen. Horgan does know that the positive reaction around the demo is too big for them to ignore.
“I know a lot of members of our team have jobs lined up or maybe aren’t necessarily gonna be working in games, so [the project] will be in flux,” said Horgan. “The hope is there and I think the love is there, too. People want to see Howie and Yarla become a thing.”
Vanishing Point
Above: Vanishing Point’s stasis field doesn’t have gravity, so you can place objects anywhere you want.
What is it?
Vanishing Point is a first-person puzzle-solving game about Rose, a young girl dealing with a supernatural form of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AWS). In real life, AWS distorts a person’s perspective so that things appear unnaturally bigger or smaller than they actually are. In the game, Rose can grow and shrink a number of objects just by approaching them (making them bigger) or walking away (scaling them down).
How it changed
With its sparse rooms and puzzles, the fall 2014 demo felt like something you would’ve found in Valve’s Portal games. Since then, the developers worked hard to hone in on Vanishing Point’s identity. They added a lot of little details like furniture and propaganda posters, which really made the kooky hospital setting stand out a lot more.
Making it prettier was something the team always planned to do since last year, when the group was still getting used to making a game in Unreal Engine 4.
“Polish was essential to the process,” said co-creator Sam Sandweiss. “I’m really happy we made those mistakes last semester, so we were able to say, ‘OK, this doesn’t work. Let’s try something else.’”
The developers also thought of adding a gravity mechanic that was similar in scope to the scaling gameplay, but the faculty told them they didn’t have enough time. A part of this element still lives on in the stasis field, Vanishing Point’s big new feature. It’s a purplish area where gravity doesn’t exist. Inside, players can move objects wherever they want, which can lead to scenarios like creating a series of platforms made of giant plates to reach another floor.
Team lead Max Cohen accidentally stumbled on the idea one day in March when he forgot to turn on the gravity for an object he was looking at. By the end of the month, they had the stasis field in the game.
Challenges the team faced
“We knew we wanted to make [Vanishing Point] look better, but at the same time, we had so many great creative people on the team that we kept wanting to add stuff to it,” said Cohen. “We had to stop ourselves from doing it and look back on it and really polish what we had. That was a challenge. It was hard saying ‘no’ to people.”
The biggest thing that the leads learned this semester was how to effectively communicate with their large team, some of who worked remotely for months before coming together. They had to make sure everyone was working toward the same goals. As a result, the team established a sort of assembly-line system. One person would build the framework of something needed for the game (everything from art to sound design) and pass it off to other people who’d touch it up.
For spring Demo Day, they wanted to add more personality to Vanishing Point’s world and turn it from “a set of mechanics in a rectangular room” into a proper gameplay experience.
Plans after graduation
Vanishing Point’s development is on hiatus due to core team members graduating and having other obligations. Cohen and Sandweiss both say they would love to come back and finish it when the time is right. If that day does come, a port to the Oculus Rift VR headset might also be a possibility. They think the size-changing gameplay would look cool in VR.
“If we really wanted to, we could keep working on it,” said Sandweiss. “But I think right now, we all want to take a break and enjoy summer and then see what is in store [for us].”
Pareidolia: A Cast of Shadows
Above: Sun Wukong, the “Monkey King” from a famous Chinese novel, is one of the characters in the game.
What is it?
Pareidolia is telling two separate but interconnected stories by using two different devices. On PC, it plays like a 2D platformer. You guide a series of legendary heroes through different levels. On a tablet (connected to the same network as the PC), you’re a shadow puppeteer manipulating 3D shapes. The shadows those shapes cast are actually the obstacles in the 2D world, and moving them around changes what you see on your PC.
How it changed
In the fall semester, Pareidolia’s creators thought they could squeeze in a complete version of the game’s prologue and first two acts by the end of the program. But one and a half months into the second semester, they realized that wasn’t going to happen. Creative director Alec McNamara said that the first act turned into a “much bigger beast” than his group originally thought it would be.