Projects / FlashFire
University Final Year Project
Flashfire is the biggest personal project I have worked on to date; it took nearly a whole year in total to finish. I developed the game for my final year project for my BSc Computer degree and had to do quite a bit of extra-curricular research to get the knowledge I needed to get the game made. At the end of the project I had to do a marked presentation of my game and explain the project from start to finish in a clear, concise manner.
Feature List
- Custom tile-set support for user generated maps
- Fully featured map editor with load/save support
- Sound effects and a range of BGM tracks
- Hardware acceleration through the use of OpenGL
- Animated in game sprites
- Supports up to 4 players
- Customisable game settings
- Inbuilt game and editor help
- Six unique pickups including the famous kick power-up
- In game pause support
Skills gained/developed
- Research and analytical skills
- Design skills
- Asset creation
- GUI and game input handling skills
- UML diagram creation skills
- Designing reusable components
- Project management skills
- Risk analysis experience
- Presentation skills
- Problem solving and programming experience with C++
- Experience with the OpenGL API
- Report writing
- Testing and bug fixing skills
- Evaluation skills
- Experience with design patterns
- Task breakdown, scheduling and budgeting
When I look back at Flashfire I am left wishing I could have put more into it, fixed a few bugs, polished a bit more yet I am often truly amazed at the amount I got done in the time given. It was really only after Flashfire that I started to appreciate the amount of hours that go into creating even simple games let a known the AAA titles of the mainstream game industry. I am proud of Flashfire and I often look back and laugh at how lucky I was to be able to work on something that I love for my final year project.
Trivia
- Animations nearly didn’t make it into the game as the schedule was so tight. However, after seeing a quick test of simple movement animation I was so stunned at the difference it made I reshuffled tasks to get it in.
- For a while I had a one frame delay on the chain reaction of bombs which I eventually took out. This was because during testing players could exploit with it when they had maximum speed by running round creating a moving firewall behind them.
- Although AI never made it into the game, I spent a considerable amount of time researching exactly how I would implement it and all the code was ready for it but I never got the time to put it in.
- While experimenting with game play I put in a trigger bomb pickup but decided against fully implementing it so it was scrapped.
- Other than one other person working on a GBA game, I was the only person in my year that made a game for their final project.
- Even with constant reassessment of the Flashfire schedule I had spent the second half of the year putting in extra development time to recover from a six week slippage in time budget.