Month 10: Operating Systems and Structure of Game Production Part1

This month we had a lot of work. First in OPS, Gary Miller taught us how operating systems are designed and structured. He also introduced us to multithreaded programming. In SGP1 we began design and production on a group game called Spectrum. John O’Leske, Rob Martinez, Ron Powell and Sean Hathaway all lead us through industry standard production cycles while we put together this game from scratch.

In OPS, we learned about operating systems and how they use multithreaded programming in order to have seamless functionality and user interfaces. During Lecture Gary told us of the old ways computers functioned as well as their evolution and his experiences in the industry over the years. The book was a little hard to understand at times but the more you read the more it makes sense and the more ready you will be for the weekly quizzes and the final. In lab we tackled classic multithreaded problems which had Gary’s own modern twists. The “Dining-Philosophers” problem became the “Not Enough Alcohol at the Party” problem. We even got to work on Pong again except this time we set up multithreaded simulations of variable amounts of players and games.

In SGP1, we split up into groups of 4-5 people to work on games we prototyped in ROG. The class is broken up into sprints (2 weeks) were each team member is assigned user stories that they are responsible for getting down on time, the amount of user stories accomplished as well as effort determines how much money (fictional, represents grade) your team gets in the end of the sprint. The first 2 weeks were designing and documenting everything we wanted in our game. We had to be extremely descriptive using other products as examples. These documents ended up being more than 100 pages long which means we had little sleep during that sprint. The next 2 weeks were building tools we would use to create assets for our game. For Spectrum we had, Albert Jen doing the Tile Editor, Tyler Berry doing the Animation Editor, yours truly working on the Particle Editor and Mac Reichelt working in the code base to get our game up and running. We also had to spin the wheel of misfortune (a tool used to inject chaos into the class). We spun Dev Blog and Dress Code which meant that we had to keep a daily blog of our progress and now have to dress professionally when we show up for class. Other possible spins include Localization (to a foreign country) and Team Swap, switching a random team member with another team for the sprint.

I am looking forward to this month were we only have to worry about SGP it will be a lot of work and many hours not sleeping but I think we will have an awesome game when all is said and done.

Here are some pix of my Particle Editor:

Month 9: Rules of the Game and Structure of Game Design

This month we got to make two games, one by ourselves in SGD and another with a group in ROG. We learned a great of what makes up a game including ways to increase the fun factor. In ROG Steve Vanzandt showed us how to use Game Maker to make prototypes and introduced us to Unity. In SGD David Brown (worked on the menu system in 50-Cent Bulletproof) showed us how to make professional games including menus, installers and a variety of other features.


In ROG I got put on a group with Vincent Biancardi and Kahran Ghosalkar. We all worked really hard all Month to make our game, Infestation. We split up the tasks evenly and remained as organized as possible. We had lots of chances to test our game on different groups of people to see the areas that we needed to focus on. We even got a chance to present our game and do postmortem at the end of the month. Two weeks into production Valve released Alien Swarm, we noticed how our game held many similarities to it and laughed about it the rest of the month. The game takes place in a radioactive town infested with giant insects. The player must maneuver their squad and use various weapons and formations to battle through hordes of insects. They must slaughter all to find a way out.

Paper Model

In SGD I had a chance to make a game on my own (with help from friends and instructors). I was inspired by the old Terminator Midway arcade game as well as The Matrix. So I made The Terminatrix (Terminator + The Matrix). Only at the end of the month did I bother to Google Terminatrix and found that the name had been taken by a Japanese soft-core porn movie about a robot dominatrix killing machine (Terminator + Dominatrix). Had I know that at the beginning of development I would have changed the name. So my advice is Google early, Google often. My game is a top-down shooter where you can search, shoot and blast your way through waves of enemies and obtain powerups along the way.