Donut Drifters!

Team project, made during Block B of my 2nd year at BUas
this page only covers my contribution to the project
last updated 28.11.22

Donut Drifters was a very fun project to work on! My contribution mainly consists of system design and prototyping, as we had to move fast because of the 2-week time constraint.

During Block B we were tasked with creating 3 games within 2 months, while still going through the entire development cycle of concepting, pre-production, production and release.

This was the first game we made, and by working on it, I learned some important things which proved to be especially useful for the projects which followed, mainly regarding time management, resource allocation, but also what approach to take when working under such constraints.

🎓 What did I learn from this project?

⏩ Fast prototyping & research

One of the most important factors I had in mind was the time constraint. I was working within a team of 9 people, so everything had to move fast if we wanted to ship a somewhat polished playable build.

This project taught me to take different approaches to research. Instead of starting to look up information online and collect it into a document, I started researching by prototyping, starting with the movement system.

This was especially useful for later projects and has changed the way I do research, learning to adapt per needs of the projects and the team to make it work.

📈Understanding the scalability of a project

The end product was one of the most polished games from the block, and was very fun to play; we were very proud of it, yet in the end we got rather opposing feedback from the teachers. Why was that?

It was already a pretty much completed game. There was no room for expansion if it was to pass into the next block and have a team continue work on it.

After some retrospect, I came to the conclusion that we severely underscoped the entire game, so we could fit it into the 2 week time frame. This worked, but caused the project to not have a lot of areas to really build upon.

🛠️ Here is our process!

1. Concepting

Once the team was assembled and briefed, we got started on concepting. We got together on a Miro board and played a few brainstorming games such as hot potato and quickly came up with some fun ideas.

Each one of us came up with a concept, starting from a few random words. After settling on a number of game concepts, we started voting for the ones we liked most. In the end, Donut Drifters was the winning pick, which was my suggestion! 😃

2. Prototyping!

Once we set our concept in stone, I got to prototyping right away, so the team can get on the same page as soon as possible.

I started by experimenting with the movement system, since we wanted the gravity to revolve around the donut's surface.

In a few hours I had this result working in the project, which used a ray cast to test for the surface, then set the rotation of the player character to the reverse of the hit normal.

While it was a bit buggy, it got the point across and was a nice proof-of-concept implementation which we could use as a reference.

3. Sketching & implementing ideas!

When it got to the powerups, I started doing some research into Super Mario Kart powerups and drawing some inspiration from them, since it seemed like they would fit the game.

After my research and some brainstorming, I concluded that 5 powerups should be the sweetspot, and sketched them out so that the artists in our team can start modeling some assets.

The sketches were clear and the whole team was on the same page. Awesome! This enabled us to quickly move through pre-production and already have some very basic gameplay and assets in the project!

Once the assets were in, I implemented the powerups' functionalities.

The End!

Go check out one of my other projects!