Edwin Teoh
Development
It was Team Siew Mai's first time using a graphics engine, hence we wanted to keep it simple and do a side-scrolling combat game.
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As usual, this team understood the limitations of what we had and worked around those limitations.
One being that none of us knew how to do sprite animation with arms and limbs, this could potentially take up a lot of time to learn so we opted for a character that was shaped like a cube and when he moved bounced around to indicate that he was moving.
The scope of this project was significantly bigger compared to our previous game, Arcus Vindex, but the number of people working on it did not change. We needed to be smart and efficient about how we allocate and handle large aspects of the game's design.
To cover the level design aspect, we used a bitmap-csv system where all team members could plan out quickly and most importantly see how the levels looked by viewing a csv file. Within the csv file is a list of comma-separated numbers, and each number corresponds to a type of block that is placed in the level. The benefit of using this approach was that a csv file was read similarly to an excel spreadsheet and we could color code the cells when viewed in excel. An example is shown in the image below.
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If we want to make changes to the csv file, all we needed to do was to amend the values of the numbers and then save it back into the same csv. This saves a lot of time on the iteration process.
Credits
Ivan Tan - Tech Lead
Samuel Chia - Product & Test Manager
Willy Lau - Game Designer