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ShadowMaster through the lenses of Steve McConnell’s 36 Classic Mistakes

An update from Benjamin, a member of the Guildhall at SMU team blogging for Gamasutra: ShadowMaster is a 2D top-down spatial puzzle adventure. A team of four fresh students attending the Guildhall at Southern Methodist University designed, animated, coded, tested and implemented their original game idea in Torque X 2D Builder. The team consisted of an artist, Michael Viscio, a programmer, William Wood, a level designer, Chih Han Yu, and a producer and team lead, Ben Roye. The team developed the game in ten weeks while attempting to stick to forty-eight team-hours per week. The current build of ShadowMaster runs on Windows 7 and can be downloaded for free. Future plans for the game include a likely port to Xbox Live Indie [...]

2012-10-17T19:50:24+00:00 October 17th, 2012|Guildhall at Gamasutra 2012|
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Cyborg Ninjas on Fire 2: Reloaded

An update from Navin, a member of the Guildhall at SMU team blogging for Gamasutra: Cyborg Ninjas on Fire 2: Reloaded (CNOF2R) is a fast-paced, over-the-top, first person-shooter mod for UDK. The players take on the role of futuristic cyborg ninjas fighting over control of a legendary suit of armor called the Yoroi. The total development time for CNOF2R was ten weeks (thirty person-hours per week), and was developed for both the Xbox 360 and PC platforms. This postmortem analyzes the obstacles and challengers our team encountered during the production phase. What Went Well 1. Functional Working Environment At our workplace, other development teams have already occupied all of the breakout rooms in the building. Fortunately, we found a small pit [...]

2012-10-17T19:47:20+00:00 October 17th, 2012|Guildhall at Gamasutra 2012|
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The Day Ice Cream Stood Still

An update from Trevor, a member of the Guildhall at SMU team blogging for Gamasutra: The Day Ice Cream Stood Still is a 2D platforming puzzle game that was designed using the TorqueX 2D editor by a five-student team from The Guildhall at SMU. The game took ten weeks, using 60-hour man weeks from concept to completion and was developed for the PC using a console controller. This following is the post-mortem for The Day Ice Cream Stood Still. The Classic Mistakes in reference to Rapid Development by Steve McConnell describe what went well, what went wrong, and what we as a team learned from the development. What Went Well: 1. Avoiding Classic Mistake #1: Undermined Motivation If one thing was true of [...]

2012-10-17T19:46:20+00:00 October 17th, 2012|Guildhall at Gamasutra 2012|
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Revisiting TGP1

An update from Dustin, a member of the Guildhall at SMU team blogging for Gamasutra: Time moves strangely at the Guildhall. We’re off in Plano, miles away from the SMU campus proper, in our own little video game world. Not that we’ve learned much about Plano. I’m familiar with the two streets between my house and the Guildhall. Generally, a quarter of your coursework is intended to be dedicated to team game projects (TGP). But as you might imagine, when you give a group of gamers the chance to work on their (usually) first group video game to completion, the effort they're willing to put in is sometimes beyond the project requirements. Our schedule is almost universally considered relentless, but a [...]

2012-10-17T19:58:10+00:00 October 17th, 2012|Guildhall at Gamasutra 2012|
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