May is a hectic time for college seniors. They’re staying up all night to study for finals, saying goodbye to friends they may not see for a while, and figuring out which relatives they can take to graduation. If that wasn’t stressful enough, the students in the University of Southern California’s Advanced Games class had one more thing to worry about: making a video game.
Five months ago, I visited USC Games’ fall Demo Day showcase and played the games this year’s student teams were working on. They were rough and had temporary music, animations, and art. But they had a lot of potential as well. The purpose of the fall semester is to build playable prototypes, even if all the students have is just one level to experience.
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“I was just at the dress rehearsal for this event yesterday. And really seeing those ideas that last year were fresh and new — now, they’re executed. They’re polished. They’re really beautiful,” said USC Games director Tracy Fullerton to GamesBeat. “That is really rewarding. The teams may be not so fresh. They’re tired and a little bit weary from finals and from the last push on their projects. But, hopefully, they’re all in clean clothes and looking as excited as exhausted people can [Laughs]. … No seriously, they’re all super excited.”
Luckily, I didn’t meet any stinky students. All I saw were smiles as family, friends, and potential employers filled the tiny demo room. The students I spoke with felt a mix of different emotions now that the year-long course was coming to a close. While the future of their games is uncertain, they’re immensely proud of their work and grateful for the lessons they learned during the program.
ElemenTerra
Above: In ElemenTerra, you play as a gender-neutral nature spirit.
What is it?
ElemenTerra is an open-ended VR game that’s more about mastering your skills than seeing a story through its conclusion. You’re a nature spirit who has the power to shape the world of Aisha as you see fit. With your special staff, you can grow plants, carve out caves, and create mountains by just moving your arms and wrists. The developers used an Oculus Rift headset, Razer Hydra motion controllers, and a prototype of Sixense’s STEM motion-tracking system.
How it changed
When I first saw ElemenTerra last year, the basic gameplay elements were in place. I moved the staff with my right hand to create plants and sculpt twisted monuments made of stone. At the time, project director Max Pittsley told me that they had to figure out what to do with the title. Should they make it into more of a traditional game with objectives or keep what they have and polish it to show the possibilities of VR?
They ended up with a compromise. While ElemenTerra is still something you can play at your own pace, the team improved the tutorial and added voice-over dialogue that sets up the lore behind the game. A brief introduction gives an overview of the folk-tale inspired mythos, where Father Sun and Mother Moon (your spirit’s celestial parents) guide the player through their powers.
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Pittsley’s team refined the gameplay by recoding it from scratch to address playability issues. They also added creatures who populate the planet when you create a lot of plants and biomes.
Challenges the team faced
“One of the biggest challenges was scoping things because the deadline was that much closer. We had to make sure that anything new we started would be finished and polished in time,” said Pittsley. “Gauging [what is] finished and polished is a little hard because students in general are just used to [finishing projects rather than finishing and polishing them]. We had to kill some babies, as they say … and they were right!”
One of those “babies” was making a 3D model of the nature spirit’s body. The developers only had time to finish the hands, which at least replaced the generic blue hands that were in there before. Programming the otherworldly animals was also a difficult task, partly because they had to figure out how the A.I. creatures would move around a constantly changing landscape.
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Plans after graduation
Initially, ElemenTerra was never meant to become a proper game that anyone could download and play. But that started to change as the students received positive feedback from the people who played it, with many asking when they’d get to try ElemenTerra at home. So a few members from the team founded a start-up called Freeform Labs through the help of an incubator at USC’s Annenberg School.
For now, it’s just Pittsley and art director Camille Kanengiser in the company, and they’re currently figuring out how many other people they should bring in. They want to turn ElemenTerra into a viable commercial product.
King Basil’s Quest for the Crown of Spudly Awesomeness
Above: King Basil’s troops (bottom castle) follow predetermined paths.
What is it?
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King Basil’s Quest is a comedic spin on the tower-defense genre. Its development team calls it a “tower assault” game. The titular king has an obsession with a fast-food chain called Tater King, and he’ll go to great lengths to redeem his lifetime supply of free fried potato nuggets. You control King Basil’s army of archers, knights, and powerful towers as it marches up the screen to attack various Tater King franchises.
How it changed
Last time I spoke with creative director Trevor Taylor, he felt that all his group needed to do in the spring was polish the wealth of content it already had. The team quickly realized that was easier said than done, especially when it came to updating all the placeholder art from the fall. Since King Basil’s Quest is in 2D, the aspiring developers couldn’t just edit textures; they had to completely redraw everything.
It was a time-consuming process. They had difficulty finding many 2D artists on campus, so they outsourced much of their art to students from other schools.
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Other changes included tweaking the lighting and re-recording much of the dialogue. The only new piece of content is a tutorial stage.
Challenges the team faced
Iterating a narrative-driven adventure wasn’t easy because certain storytelling elements (like the introductory cutscene) didn’t come together until near the end of the project. Play testers gave feedback based on an incomplete understanding of what was going on. And the story had to adapt to any changes made to the level designs. But it all seemed to work out in the end.
“We had children playing it today. That’s like the ultimate dream: Make it so easy to … understand that even a child could grasp it,” said lead designer Calvin Drake. “That was a really good moment for me. That it all finally came together and suddenly worked.”
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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.
It didn’t help that a new feature in Act 2 — where players can stack shadows together to create new objects in the 2D world — was taking up a lot of design and engineering time. So early on, the team decided to shelve Act 2 and just work on improving the prologue and Act 1 as much as possible.
Challenges the team faced
Though the technical foundation for the two-screen experience was mostly solid after the first semester, the engineering work for the rest of the game was still a major hurdle.
“Everything we do in one world has to be reflected in the other world. A lot of one-off code has to go into it, even when we got our architectural base in, our network architecture, and things like that,” said McNamara. “We can get the [3D models] to determine the position of the shadow analogues pretty easily, but it’s when we want these shadow analogues to have a sophisticated interaction with the other shadows — it’s a lot of code.”
Whatever new features the designers came up with had to take into account their effects on both devices, like how touching the 3D fan on the tablet makes it spin faster, thus increasing the wind speed in the 2D world. Everything had to reflect the interdependence between the tablet and the PC.
Plans after graduation
Most of the team is graduating. McNamara encouraged his colleagues to take jobs and not wait around to see if making the rest of Pareidolia will be feasible or not. If development does continue, it’ll be with just a handful of people who’d try to submit the game at festivals. One day, they hope to ramp back up to the level of production needed to finish it.
“Now everyone is trying to figure out ways to pay for rent,” said McNamara. “People are trying to decide whether to take these jobs and whether they should move across the country and stuff like that. We do plan on continuing the game going forward, but day-to-day, the logistics get harder and harder for that to happen.”
