The Expendable
This capstone project began as a teardown and recreation of an existing video game. We were given just under four months as a team of six designers, with two artists joining us for the last month.
Our team chose to use Spyro the Dragon as our inspiration because it had clean and simple mechanics which we felt could be expanded on in interesting ways.
After we had recreated the core mechanics of Spyro the Dragon in Unreal Engine 4, we began to experiment with new mechanics to replace or modify the base we had developed.
This iteration process spanned the middle two months of development time and consisted of four two-week sprints in which each designer would develop new mechanics as well as blockout levels to showcase them. These iterations would regularly build off of each other, allowing us to work faster as we developed a code base and an understanding of the game over time.
During the last month, we focused on polishing the game by adding audio and video feedback for the player, new textures and assets courtesy of our art team, and bug hunting individually and as a team.
Trailer
We created a trailer for our game by cutting together gameplay footage and exported camera footage from UE4’s cinematic system.
Postmortem
Below is a short postmortem video recorded by the team during the last weeks of our degree program. We discuss what went well, what we could have done better, and what we learned from the project.
Preproduction
Our first month was spent primarily on getting the game in a functional prototype state so that we could begin our iteration. This meant getting the player model up and moving, creating a toybox for testing and metrics, and designing some of the earliest iterations of our base mechanics.
Selected Milestone Reviews
Systems Integration
This is where we started implementing new ideas into the game. Each designer was tasked with creating at least one major mechanic and one blockout level per sprint, giving us a wide range of ideas to work with when the time came to narrow them down.
Game Balancing
As we passed the halfway point of the project, the team began focusing more on refining and building on our original ideas. This is where the game stopped playing like Spyro the Dragon and became its own experience.