Project Type:  Student

Release Date:  4/2012

Resources:  Website, DigiPen Game Gallery

Role:  Producer, Programmer (Graphics, Audio)

Details:

We had a lot of fun making Robotville Adventures in our freshman year, but we were disheartened that it really didn’t seem to make waves with anyone.  Few people had played it, and hardly anyone was even aware it existed.  And of course, all anyone could talk about from our class was Dig-N-Rig.  So, we decided to switch gears and make a much more serious game.  The result was Coalescence.

This was a new experience for us in many ways.  We had a full game under our belts, we had a better understanding of what went into a game engine and tools, we had access to actual graphical APIs, and we could bring designers onto the team officially.  Those designers came up with a great concept, but one which we just couldn’t fully execute within the year.  The game we ended up with was pretty decent, but it pails in comparison to the game they had envisioned.  And again, we ended up with a game that we liked, but which few people were playing or aware of.  The best lesson I learned from it was to stop worrying about making anything for anyone else and just make the things that I liked.  And I think that the work I’ve gotten done shows for the better as a result.

Also, this was the start of my love affair with DirectX.  I built the graphics engine for Coalescence on DX 9 and while I didn’t put in a lot of flash like post processing, I learned a lot about what it took to build a solid, high performance rendering system.  To that end, I built a basic quad batcher, a texture reference counter, and a sprintsheet animation system (including necessary pipeline tooling).  On the other hand, the whole game managed to run on one very basic shader because I didn’t quite understand what was going on with those yet.

After we wrapped up Coalescence, I felt really good about my progress and prowess in graphics programming, and it’s what led me to start work on the DX11 based engine I developed for Evac.