About This Project
Boom and Bloom is a game made over the course of a semester outside of class time with a group of 5 students, including me as both the designer and leader of the project.
This game is a first person shooter where you fight back waves of enemies with the unique mechanic of needing to plant your "gun" into the ground to be able to reload bullets.
I was the project lead and the designer on this project.
Peyton Crua was a co-lead programmer
Adam Kaci was a co-lead programmer
Julian Rosas was a programmer
Hayden Hogan-Doria was the artist
Peyton Crua was a co-lead programmer
Adam Kaci was a co-lead programmer
Julian Rosas was a programmer
Hayden Hogan-Doria was the artist
My Roles in This Project
Game Design Documentation
As the game designer for this project I needed to make a design document to keep all of our additions and changes to the game in check. For this project I tried out a different service for the game design document called Workflowy.com. The unique feature of this website was that bullet points could be expanded into more bullet points, making organization easier.
While this website was nice to use and helped me organize it was not that much better than just using Google Docs, and less accessible for the programmers as most people have Google Docs and not many have used Workflowy.
I am getting consistently better at organizing the important information about the game in my game design document, especially about gameplay mechanics and systems. I did not get into the art, however, so for my next project I want to make it a point to include details about the art relevant to the project in my game design document.
Combat Design/Balance
More so than any of my other projects Boom and Bloom has a major focus on combat, being a shooter game. My goal with this game was to give it a unique mechanic to make the gameplay feel different than the average shooter. Being inspired by Plants Versus Zombies, I ultimately decided that the guns would be plants, and to reload the guns you must plant them into the ground and wait for them to reload over time.
As I developed this mechanic the game turned from simply a shooter game to a strategy shooter mixed with a tower defense. I initially wanted the player to be fighting off enemies trying to directly attack the player, but I eventually added a simple tower defense system where the player is defending a carrot (The Tower) from an oncoming horde of weeds (The Enemies). I feel like this fit into my new focus on strategy well, as you are now forced to manage your and your tower's health as well as the ammo for your three plant guns.
Nailing down the actual mechanics was only half of the battle, after we got it all implemented I spent a good chunk of time balancing the stats of the different guns and enemies.
UI Design
I have had experience with UI design in other projects before, so this was nothing entirely new to me, but it is always good for me to practice those skills. This is the first time I have designed a UI for a "traditional" game so it was fun to design the UI for something with generally easier to convey mechanics.
Leadership
This project was the first of (hopefully) many games that I am the leading with a group of students with the goal of getting experience working with a group and making games that you could add to a resume. I want to generally finish one game per semester with this group so I wanted to be very careful about the scope of the game we were creating. As I learned from the game jams that I worked on before this, keeping the scope of the game small was vital to the success of the project.
As the original goal for the project, I wanted to ensure that, at the very least, Boom and Bloom would have the basic mechanics working in a test room/prototype area. As we worked on the game more I would increase or decrease the scope depending on how much we were getting done and how fast. With our workload I was able to increase the scope slightly to create a simple gameplay loop and wave system with the tower defense system that I mentioned earlier.
My experience working at Chick Fil A as an Area Team Leader was very helpful in this project. Learning how to work with people to achieve a common goal is something that is very important to learn not just as a leader but as someone who is going to work on projects with a group in the future.
While I feel like I did a good job leading the team for my first time leading a major project I still have a lot to learn. For example, I had a hard time getting some of the members to get work done on the project, so trying to create the game around that issue was a big learning experience. I really had to learn how to put my foot down and be more firm with people. I am looking forward to improving my leadership skills in projects to come.
