ODYSSEY

Odyssey was a top-down action shooter game I worked on during the Spring semester of 2018. It was developed as part of a team of 4 people where I designed and developed the levels for the game as well as created level assets when I needed them. This project was the brainchild of our project lead, who gave feedback to myself, the programmer, and the composer we had on our team as we developed it. We entered the work-in-progress build of our game into the 2018 New York State Game Dev Challenge and won 2nd place in the student division, earning us $8,000.

The three of us that joined our project lead started work on his existing project when it had the outline of a story and one half of a level built. Throughout the course of a semester, we developed it into a demo that had 2 and a half levels and several music tracks as well as submitted it to the NYS Game Dev Challenge and won 2nd place. I used a program called Crocotile 3D to create 3D meshes of levels out of a tileset. The program was a little old without updates and little-to-no documentation, so figuring it out was a fun challenge. I took the half of a level the project lead started me with and stayed within his style to finish that level as well as develop a hub level, a new mission level, and the beginning of a second mission level before the semester ended and the project was put on hold.

Working in this small team taught me a lot about developing games as a group. Our professor for this "class" was very hands off, only requiring a weekly touch down to see our progress. At RIT it's actually called a "production studio" instead of a normal class. We set our own deadlines and determined our own workload, including how much work we thought we could reasonably do within the entire semester. We met once or twice a week in person to talk about what we did the previous week and figure out our plan for the following week. Overall it was a very rewarding experience and I'm proud of the work I did on this game.