Contra Mundum
Contra Mundum is a turn-based tactical strategy game. It is a 2-semester project. It's made by a team of 6: Corbin, Mason, Mike, Robert, Sean, and myself.
Making a game is actually not as difficult as I thought it would be. Granted this game is fairly simple. Nevertheless, all the nuts and bolts are there and the whole process of making a game is still a lot easier than I have envisioned. The project is actually quite interesting and fairly challenging. The challenge comes from the fact that our professor forbade us to use DirectX or any sort of graphics API. We're bascially stuck with CRT and have to build everything from the ground up. I suppose that's the way to really learn what it means to make a game. We're also not allowed to use fancy tool to create graphics. Whatever we make must be done with the Extended ASCII character set. We had to build a tool for creating these little tiles with ASCII characters and then storing them as bitmap. The graphics actually turned out to be decent given the limitation. Good old 8-bit graphics.
After 2 long semesters, the game is "finished", but of course, it's not really finished. It needs more polish; game mechanics need balancing; need more and better multiplayer maps; I can go on and on. Some things that we planned to do didn't make it into the game. The multiplayer co-op mode and the game server didn't make it into this version. The codes are still there, and for the most part they work. But at the end of the project, I had to spend so much time working on the single player aspect of the game that I had no time at all to work on the multiplayer aspect; no time to test any of it really. So, in the end I decided to just get rid of co-op and the server. Given another month, perhaps, those might make it in.
Although we didn't do some of the things, we still did a whole lot. Almost every day for the past few months I spent working on the game - created contents here and there; added triggers to drive game events; worked some puzzles into the single player mode; play tested and balanced the different skills. Everyone on the team has done his share of the work too. It is amazing how much effort is required to make something as simple as this. I can't even begin to imagine how much time and how many people it takes to make a game like Halo 2.
The game could use more play-testing, but time was always an issue (and everyone taking 6 classes certainly didn't help the matter.) I've learned quite a bit in the process of making this. It's certainly not possible to make a fun game out of a dull design concept, and even if you have a really good game design, it's still hard to make a fun game out of it. Something that sounds fun on paper may not work out that way. But then by the time you found out, it's too late ... you either live with it or get rid of it. The most important thing I've learned: making a fun game is definitely NOT easy. Making a game isn't necessarily difficult, but making it fun is pretty hard.
Although I think we could've done more and better, I am still pretty happy with what we've done. Overall, I think we did a pretty good job. Making this was a great learning experience. I had so much fun doing it.
-EC