jMonkeyEngine.org

I’d like to take the opportunity to share with y’all the project I work on as part of my intensive study to become a professional game designer:
playotherside.com

I am now in my 4th term (every term being ~2 months) in the game design course at the Vancouver Film School, which means we’ve started working on our 6 month long “final projects”. At the end of term 6, every team should have about ~15 minutes worth of game content.

Do note, this is not a jME based game. The main reason for this is that none of the instructors at VFS are anywhere near as intimately familiar with jMonkeyEngine as they are with the likes of Unity, UDK and Flash. Meaning, we wouldn’t have any experienced mentors to rely on for our many queries during production, so it is just too big of a risk. We will be developing this game in Unity, and I’m very excited to affiliate myself with what is quickly becoming the most popular 3D engine in the industry. I’m already confident jMonkeyEngine is a worthy competitor.

So why should you check out playotherside.com? Well…
- If you’re considering attending a game development school, our website will tell you a whole lot about what you learn and get to do at a school like VFS.
- If you’re interested in game development in general, our website could teach you a lot about many individual disciplines, such as doc design, level design, concept art and programming. We are by no means experts, but we put our hearts into everything we do on this project.
- If you’re a proponent of open practices, this blog should serve as a good example. Although we’re not in a position to fully open source our work, we’ll post as much of our work as possible in the open.

There’s plenty of good and bad to say about VFS, so any questions you might have I would be more than happy to answer. Bear in mind that this is just one game development school out of many. VFS is also rather unique in that it tries to focus mainly on design, i.e. the technical side of game production comes second. Once again, plenty of good and bad, he he.

There’s now a playable prototype available online:

http://playotherside.com/2011/11/whats-this-a-playable-demo/

Our awesome lead programmer also happens to be an avid YouTuber, so she made this walkthrough video to go along with our first prototype release:

Please playtest and comment on the game concept and gameplay as it stands.

@Momoko_Fan said:
Thats strange because I imagined the game would have an overhead view (looking at the design doc) rather than third person. I think overhead is better because then you can see all sides of the cube and better plan how to get through the level.

Heh, and I wholeheartedly agree, but the general consensus in the team was that we should go with this behind-the-player third person view instead, which is reflected in the revised doc. You’re right, this detracts from the puzzle solving aspect, though we hope to mitigate that a bit by having special camera views that are triggered whilst interacting with a movement switch.

Team Hot Sauce? haha excellent! Combines sexy and exciting in a wonderful way.

I agree with Momoko_Fan that top-down would help with the puzzle aspect. But the mechanics are there already so it would be easy to experiment with different views, and it looks great.

A few reasons for top-down/zoomed-out:
- you can see more than one cube at a time, and can therefore look ahead and solve the puzzle
- graphics: zooming out gives you a chance to make it look prettier: less detail on the cubes, just use a good texture and a normal map. No need to detail a large flat surface (which is really hard to do)
- being as close in as you are (zoom-wise), you are only relevant to your neighbour cube; since you cannot really see cubes farther away than the one you are on, or the one you are going onto. So your active area of interest is only 1-2 cubes. Where if you were zoomed out, it could be several more.
- nothing to do with top-down, but you should put a cow or something on the rotating platforms, so when you hit the button, the poor cow goes flying, yea

Gonna download the demo this weekend; can’t wait to see how this turns out!

Thanks for the advice guys.

When it comes to the camera, I would have gone with bird’s eye view in a heart beat. Pretty much a more zoomed out Bastion. But due to our design by committee and limited technical expertise to go around, we ended on the 3rd person camera. The one thing I really do like about it is how well it positions you to view those inception-like cube movements in all their might

- nothing to do with top-down, but you should put a cow or something on the rotating platforms, so when you hit the button, the poor cow goes flying, yea

We’d love to do more of that, but physics in Unity (PhysX) is quite the unpredictable little bugger.

My shameless off-topic advertisements have almost come to an end. In roughly 3 hours I’ll be standing in front of ~100 game industry professionals in the Vancouver area, presenting my team’s game, Otherside:

What a ride… Plenty of good and bad to be said about this journey and the final product we arrived at, but it’s not exactly suited for a public forum, heh. If anyone has any questions about the Vancouver Film School in general though, I’d be happy to answer with detail and honesty.