Senior Capstone Blogs

Here you’ll find my blogs for my senior capstone project, Super PAC Bros!, a semester-long pre-production process. Subjects include inspiration for ideas, iterating on design, and problems encountered during production (as well as their solutions). You can find a postmortem of the project here.

Greenlight: Passing the Cut, and then Withdrawing Anyway (12/13/15)

You may have noticed the increasing irregularity of the dates on my blog posts. If that and the last post weren’t enough of an indicator, my team and I were under some serious stress right before presenting Super PAC Bros! to our fellow students and the faculty of the college. It paid off, though- our team…

Final Iteration: Y’know, In Hindsight… (12/11/15)

It’s kind of difficult to remember specific things we did on Super PAC Bros! in order to prepare for the greenlight presentations, though a large part of that may have been due to a lot of the stress that we were under. It was emphasized by our professors that having our team pass the cut wasn’t the goal…

Proof of Concept: Applying Game Feel (11/30/15)

Given the limited amount of time we have left to pull our game together for the greenlight presentation (less than a week at time of writing), I’ve been focusing on specific aspects that needed the most fixing. I met with one of the Game Design professors (Professor Boyd, who helped us decide which ideas to…

Deep Dive: Clarifying Rules and Redesigning the UI (10/31/15)

Last week I talked about my inspirations and initial concepts for gameplay during the Campaign Mode. If it seemed a little difficult to explain the new systems, well- Yeah, players didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. One of the biggest issues was the complexity of the systems I made. When presenting the new…

Deep Dive: Super PACs, and the Damage Done (10/24/15)

Last week I had written about how invested I was in Super PAC Bros!‘s debate mode, but when my team and I presented our progress, our professor had qualms about the progress of the rest of the game. It was said in sort of a blunt manner, but it was fair, since I felt very similar…

Deep Dive: Cannibalizing 2D Level Design (10/18/15)

My previous attempts at level design have had some major commonalities: they were both 3D, first-person, and single-player. And while there are certain elements of design philosophy that can carry over, making a stage for the multiplayer Super PAC Bros! is something that’s entirely new for me. So before I jump in head-first, let’s take a…

Decision Time: Choosing Super PAC Bros (10/10/15)

After having cut Daisy, my teammates and I were down to three ideas, and in order to progress to the next stage of our capstone, we had to decide on one to focus on. Having gone through a couple of sessions of play testing, it was apparent only two of them were really interesting to players: The Husker…

Killing Your Darlings: Daisy (10/4/15)

When people first come into the game design major, they have huge misconceptions as to what the job involves. Usually, they involve some form of “I want to write game stories”, or “I want to tell people what the game should be” and, most dangerously of all, “I just come up with the ideas”. Eventually, people…

Ideation: Capital Punishment/Super PAC Bros! (9/26/15)

One of our ideas has had quite an interesting evolution: Super PAC Bros! is a 2D arena-shooter simulating a political campaign that started as neither about politics, or 2D, despite having been inspired by one. The idea started when my team’s programmer, Tyler, and I were discussing Duck Game, a recently-released 2D arena shooter where people played as…

Ideation: The Husker Report (9/19/15)

I may have been a bit behind the times, but during the last couple of weeks of summer I listened to Serial, an excellent podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig of This American Life. The series dealt with re-examining the real-life case of Adnan Syed, a man convicted in 1999 of murdering his high-school girlfriend. The problem, though,…

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Senior Capstone Blogs

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