Hello. The intent of this one-way conversation is to give you an insight to my work, thought process and reflections thereof. My name is Joakim Andreasson and I am currently studying Game Design at Gotland University. I am the member of a team of students taking a course focused on game production. My team consists of me(the programmer), three graphic-guys and a producer keeping us in line.
We are working on a project called Carnage. In short, this can be described as a turn-based, fast-paced strategy-game involving cars, explosions and the civilized taunting of opponents. Having the words turn-based and fast-paced describe the same game is perhaps somewhat unexpected but we do feel like it sums up our game pretty well. In this space I will mostly cover my individual work, for more info about Carnage in general you can visit the projects development-diary (www.CarnageTheGame.com).
I have been assigned the role of Lead Programmer in this project. As I am the only programmer in our group this seems like the natural step. Before project-start we sat down and looked at the strengths of our group, the unique points in our concept and what options were available to us. As the Carnage-concept can be adapted for pretty much any game medium it gave us quite a few possible directions regarding the form of the game. The art-people were all very interested in exploring 3D further so that became our main focus. Because of this me and Lead Art, Christoffer Akterin (http://christofferakterin.blogspot.com), sat down and looked at possible 3D game-engines we could use for the project. The first option explored was the Unity 3-engine. I did some basic work with it on my off-time and was somewhat pleased with the results. However, while this looked like quite the powerful tool we soon switched our attention over to the Unreal Engine 3. The main reason for this was that the courses we studied during this time gave us the opportunity to work in UDK (Unreal Development Kit) as part of an assignment. I had no objections as documentation for the Unreal Engine 3 and UDK seemed to be somewhat more accessible than that for Unity 3 and having no previous experience with either engine I had no preset preference. UDK it is then.
This leads up to present day. The project will start in earnest a couple of days from now and it looks to be quite the challenge considering our very small development team. My major task the first weeks is doing research on how to actually translate our game from concept to code in UDK. I hope you will tolerate my mad ramblings and keep an eye on the progress made.
