My senior capstone project as an Emerging Media major at Ithaca Collage, CelXian was a culmination of my major and all three of my computer science minors.
Design
One of my main goals with this project was to create a game that could be played multiple times. Many student games are vertical slices of games or narrative-driven smaller scale games and, having created some of these myself and graded several as a TA, I wanted to try something different. To that end, I approached the structure and play of the game a bit more like a board game than a video game.
Music
I also worked with a friend and producer to create several tracks for the game: one for the menu screens, one for the main gameplay, and one for the “game over” screen.
I decided early on that I wanted the game to be a two-player experience to increase the diversity of play, and I knew I wanted to add some procedurally generated aspects to the game “board” as well, so that the map would never look exactly same and the play would vary in a structured way from playthrough to playthrough. Once I knew the basics of the play I began designing assets, using Maya to model the tiles, characters, and other assets while simultaneously working on the development of the game.
Development
Building the game required much of the programming and modeling knowledge I had acquired over my four years at Ithaca College. I created the game in Unity, programming in C#. Creating a variety of scripts to handle particle effects, highlighting pieces, attacking, and tracking piece stats. Perhaps most complicated was a script that used conditional logic to procedurally populate the map with obstacles and the glowing “win condition” tiles. Just as complex was writing the script that controlled the pieces’ movement.
I wanted the individual “characters” to mimic board game pieces. I created a script that detected where pieces could move, taking the procedurally generated obstacles and other pieces into account, physically animating their movement along the shortest sequence of tiles from point A to B, and again, accounting for the board obstacles.
By the end of the semester I had a completed, bug-free game that played as expected and was, according to all of my play testers, fun.
