Yori Kvitchko (Team Lead, Designer, Gameplay Programming)
Dan Gopstein (Designer, Writer, Logic Programmer, Sound Director)
Tarek El-Gaaly (Art Director, AI Programming)
Ming Jin (Gameplay Programming)
In the first week we placed heavy focus on many cool features which we would eventually remove based on concerns of project complexity and aesthetic conciseness. Among the features we decided to leave behind were positionally-relevant ship damage and openly navigable space arenas. We had hoped that damages incurred in space-view play would be passed on to the crew of the ship if they were located in a region of the craft which had been injured. The design of external play was also much larger-scale than what we would eventually decide to settle on. The majority of graphics in this revision were temporary placeholder images used to facilitate the testing of gameplay.
codebase PlanetDoom_1.zip
swf PlanetDoom_1.swf
By week 4 we had settled almost all questions of top-level conceptual design, however many ambiguities remained hidden in the specifics of implementation. External game-play was already happening in a sandbox style. We worked mainly on mechanical concerns like the layout and feel of controls, rather than content specification such as boss design. By this time we had a strong inclination towards the direction of our cartoony art style, however we were still plagued by issues of visual scale inconsistency and chromatic mayhem.
codebase PlanetDoom_4.zip
swf PlanetDoom_4.swf
Week 5 consisted primarily of revisiting the visual style and attempting to resolve consistency issues. The design of each external level in the game was finalized and much of the dialog was written. Week 5 also included the implementation of the first three external levels.
codebase PlanetDoom_5.zip
swf PlanetDoom_5.swf
Weeks 6 and 7 saw the evolution of our final decided upon art style as well as a major visual revamp of the internal gameplay. Although the rules remained the same the interface changed from an RTS style top down to a view reminiscent of a widescreen movie. The game was playable and nearly complete at this point with only a few things remaining, leaving us to spend more time balancing the level progression and play test extensively.
codebase PlanetDoom_7.zip
swf PlanetDoom_7.swf
The final weeks saw extensive polish and testing. Specific focus was on testing with players who had never played or seen the game before.
codebase PlanetDoom.zip
swf PlanetDoom.swf
PostMortem PlanetDoomPostMortem.pdf