Summary
Game Engine: Unity 3
Team Size: 4
Development Time: 4 months (Oct-Jan 2010/11)
Game Type: 3rd Person Arcade Flight
My Role
On Flyware, aside from game designer, I also acted as an environmental artist, level designer, and worked in quality assurance.
The buildings were created and mapped in 3DS Max and textured in Photoshop. I used modular design when creating the buildings for Flyware. This allowed me to focus more time on creating and balancing the levels.
Our Goal with Flyware
We wanted to create a bite sized and competitive experience in a flight game in a large world with an interesting visual style that players would want to return to, compete in, and explore.
Through our play tests we could see that we achieved what we wanted. The people from our school, and outside professionals that played loved to compete against their coworkers and try and get the high score. They also enjoyed the fact that they would find something new each time they played as we hid many secrets within our game world.
Tough Decisions
Much like all development cycles, we also faced some problems and had a few hard decisions to make through out the production of Flyware. Originally, we had planned to have combat within our game, but through our play tests, we could see that people were being too overwhelmed with objectives to complete, and were not having as much fun as they were before.
We then knew we had to make a huge decision and decided to remove the combat out of Flyware so that we could focus on the core of the game which was making the game so much fun in the first place, the flight.
Objective in Flyware
In this third person flight game, you play as a hacker trying to redeem him/herself for a previous hacking related crime. The player takes control of the Flyware System and then is launched into a cyberspace metropolis where they act as a Data Pilot. The player must the retrieve as much data as they can before the system locks them up or they crash their Data Ship.
There are five data types for the player to collect.
Green Data - Numerous, located in high altitudes.
Yellow Data - Located in mid level altitudes with buildings as obstacles
Red Data - Located in low altitudes between buildings and trenches
Blue Data - Runs away from the player ship when encountered
White Data - 2x Score Multiplier for 10 seconds, hidden from the radar.
Flight
What makes flight games different from other games is that there is an equally large emphasis on each of three X Y Z axis'. It is important to focus on each of these and provide obstacles for the player on all of the axis'.
In, Flyware we often reward the players for not relying on giving them an easy safety net or escape route, such as flying through a corridor or under a bridge where they would be surrounded by walls on 4 sides. Since, Flyware does not have combat in it we were able to bring the player close into the city to fly without overwhelming the player with too many actions to worry about whilst maneuvering.
Teammates
Cody Hensels - Programmer, GUI Designer
Oscar Marin - Project Manager, Mechanics
Aaron Paguntalan - Character/GUI Artist
Audio Collaborators
Atli Erlendsson
Gordon Funk
Javier Gonzalez
