Northern Bend
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Northern Bend is a boat driving simulation game that takes place in northern Michigan during the turn of the century in the 1900's. The game is controlled by a large wooden steering wheel and a chadburn (control stick for the speed). Currently the game is display at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, and will be in there till roughly November of 2013. My participation in the project started in 2011 where I helped to concept out buildings, environments, and the game level. Eventually a class started up to create a game and I asked to be apart of it, which was actually my second time taking it (The first time was for Maximum Chaos).
During the early phase of production I was a level designer, and in some parts a simple programmer using the UDK kismet system. The roughly 8 others on the team and the teacher, worked to create the rest of the game, such as environment assets, characters, user interface, and logo designs. During the semester we managed to create a basic working of the game, which was a glorified demo to be honest.
When the semester ended we realized that the game was nowhere near done and would require much more time spent to complete it. So myself and four others ended up working on the game as our internships (Is required for graduation) and worked during the summer of 2012 to complete it. During that time I was promoted to project manager and more or less art director as our teacher had another agenda and couldn't work with us to complete the project.
With the new team we managed to make some progress towards the right direction. Though when the semester had ended we lost our character team, and in the end it was effectively cut off entirely from the game. With the team members we did have though, we would meet once a week together and share what progress we made as well as make sure everyone was on track and headed in the right direction.
As project manager I learned that I needed to take on a role differently than I had before, I had to stop being a friend and had to start being a boss. Creating schedules, making lots of phone calls, meeting with people individually, and overall just being aware of everything going on. Some of the important things I learned from it though was that sometimes being the "jerk" was what was needed in order for things to get done on time. Something else I learned was just how important it was for me to learn about my team members and to see exactly what strengths weaknesses, and life problems each person has. It allowed me to assign work better, so that important assets that needed to be done sooner were assigned to the people that would be able to create them better and faster than the others.
The role as Project Manager tied in well though with Art Director though as I had to constantly make sure that the art style was the same with all team members working on art assets. We even had one member in particular that had to optimize and clean up assets from others who weren't as skilled as the rest of us. Making sure his work was on par with everyone's was important too, as he had to change the incoming assets to look like the rest.
It was also during the summer internship that I became the lead programmer as well. While I hadn't had proper training, I had somehow managed to learn quite fast what was needed to make this game work. I studied dozens of tutorials for kismet, and even some for programming with unreal-script and c#. The kismet for the game was something that I am immensely proud of as it shows that even though I had no proper training with programming I managed to make a game work that many agree shouldn't be possible.
Aside from being a Project Manager, Art Director, and Lead Programmer, I also participated in other areas of the game too, such as Actor, Voice Actor, Sound and Music, Game Designer, Script Writer, and Concept Artist. The only area of the game I never put my hand into was the user interface and logo designing. While I did have to put the user interface into the game itself, I didn't actually work on any of the scaleform or flash animations.
After the summer semester had finished we had unfortunately still not finished the game and we had to work on it while taking classes at the same time. It was challanging, and some of the team members had slowed down progress as well, which meant I needed to work harder to get their work done myself. It was also during this time that the game was only a few months away from the deadline.
Well during the winter of 2012 we managed to get a working beta of the game going and we submitted it into the Grand Rapids ArtPrize event. It was a great success as it showed us many things we never thought of while creating the game. People were constantly trying to do things that hadn't been designed and would break the game. The next month was basically just me trying to fix the game so that it couldn't be broken.
When it finally came to install the game into the museum I ran into trouble I hadn't expected, the game wouldn't compile into an executable. All the research in the world was completely useless too. I'd spent roughly 100 hours within a weeks time trying to solve it by various means, as well as other small bugs that randomly popped up during testing. It was a testament to my resolve and determination to see this game to the end. Eventually I did find a work-around to the problem though, which was unfortunately just running the game from the editor's game mode itself. To this day I never did figure out the problem, but I have since come up with several possible solutions to fixing it, all of which would basically mean starting the level over from scratch.
Since the game has been in the museum I have had to work on it a little bit here and there to fix bugs and glitches that would occur, and the random art upgrade when time allowed. All that aside though, the game has been a booming success in ways we never thought was possible. The children that line up to play the game all have a glow in their eyes that is priceless. The parents sitting and waiting while their kids take turns to play the games all get mad that they have to wait, but the kids themselves all eagerly want to play the game, a game that is all about teaching them about life on a steam boat in the 1900's. We've even had people tell us that they came to the museum specifically just to visit the game that was made, people that none of the development team knew.
Aside from the rewarding experience of teaching children, we've also had media attention from local news stations and newspapers. While it might not be the triple A title I want to earn someday, it is still an amazing feat that I am very proud of.
If you'd like to see some of the efforts I put in, your free to browse the facebook group we made for the game's development. It can be seen here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/400120563354639/
This is the intro screen for the game, it took some time to figure out how to get it to span 3200 x 1900 pixels since flash can only go to something like 2200 pixels.
A snippet of the schedule we followed. Not everyone liked having a schedule, but they all agree it did help them keep everyone on the same page.
We used google docs to create a simple spreadsheet that allowed us to keep track of what assets we needed done, reworked, or started. It was very effective to keep a list in the long run.
Here is a small view of the kismet that drove the main portion of the game. It's pretty complex, and ideally it would have been smarter to have had it programmed, but we didn't have a programmer.
A view of myself and team member Jon Coble as we tested the game at it's ArtPrize station. The beta testing proved invaluable.
The game is now at the Grand Rapids Public Museum and on display in the Michigan Shipwrecks exhibit. It's been a smashing success to all ages, and even here we can see team member Brian Gratton playing the game for an audience.