Low-Res Demo & Campus Cops

Today was our second milestone for the Game Design course, and believe it or not, we were way ahead of schedule.

We were supposed to have a low-res version of our demo done, but we actually got further than we had hoped. We had planned to have two playable levels, the dorm room and the campus overworld. But I went in the night before and put together, in a couple of hours, a third level (a classroom).

What was in these levels was better than we'd hoped as well. The dorm room had lighting effects, triggers and actions, and scripted NPC behavior with dialogue. These were all things we had been experimenting with for the last couple of weeks, but we hadn't been able to figure out or perfect. But thanks to some help from some senior members of the team, we got some of that done. Outside of the game, we have some of the Spanish dialogue (since it is a Spanish learning game) recorded, and we have a lot of design documents that detail what else we would do with the game. And of course, the Wii-mote can be used to play the game.

I was very proud to have done the classroom level on my own, especially in such a short amount of time. It shows that I've been picking up Hammer (the level editor) and Source (our game engine) quite well.

We almost had a problem though.

When we were working in the lab at about 2 in the morning, some of the campus police came in and almost kicked us out. They asked us what time the lab was supposed to close, as if we were breaking the rules and they wanted us to admit it. But after we said it closes at 3, they did a Dr. Jeckle/Mr. Hyde switch and were super-friendly. They actually ending up staying for a while to watch us work and talk to us about the game.

So once again, I found gamers in the most unlikely of places. One of the cops was likening our project to the old Quake mods he used to build, since we are technically creating a mod of Half-Life 2. The other cop talked about his first-person shooter as well. It was cool to find gamers in places of authority, maybe as this trend continues the gaming industry will cease to be looked at as the evil media.

Although, if we want to avoid that stigma, we'll need to make a slight change to our demo. We found out that, currently, you can enter a code to get guns. Which means you could run around our campus shooting the student NPC's. Talk about a public-relations nightmare...

- Scott