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.