Project Type: Student
Release Date: 5/2011
Role: Technical Director, Tools
Details:
Rupert J Scuttlemeyer and the Robotville Adventures was my freshman game project. I was the technical director for the team, designing and implementing the core engine, establishing code and comment standards, and ensuring that the finished product met the technical needs of the game. Outside of that, I also wrote all of the tools for the game, and on the content side wrote all dialogue.
This game was a true oddity. It was written in C and built to run inside Windows’ command console, but since all freshman games at Digipen do that, it isn’t what makes this project so strange. We took everything that we were told not to do in a school game project and did it anyway. We built a game that was really 3 games in 1 (town exploration, branching dialogue driven story, 3D platforming), we built a game that was very content heavy (there were 30 town zones, 10 platforming levels, 63 NPCs, and over 2000 dialogue scenes), and we built external tools (all content tools were written in C# using WinForms). Flying in the face of conventional wisdom made things challenging and time consuming enough, but we also had no real good idea how to architect a good engine. However, we ended up making the game we set out to make, and so I consider this project a great success. We also still think it’s a pretty fun (and funny!) game.
Also, this was weirdly a sequel to my first semester solo game project, The Adventures of Young Rupert J Scuttlemeyer, Gentleman Adventurer. If it wasn’t already clear, I am terrible at naming things.