Introduction
Seas of Europa is a third-person action-adventure game set under the ice sheets of Jupiter's moon, Europa. It is a fully functional 15-minute long underwater game created by doing a near-complete conversion of the Unreal engine on a 12-week production cycle with a team of four.
The game follows the adventures of Inu (E-nu), an alien creature that is destined to be the hero of the seas. See, the waters of Europa are changing; for better or worse, the creatures are mutating, and Inu just happens to be one of them that mutates for the better. He's born with a tentacle on his head and the ability to grab creatures and fling them around. Inu - and the player - are charged with clearing the seas of enemies that are hogging the life-giving heating vents.
The team - Outsourced Games - is made up of Todd Agnello, David Bowring, Diego Pons and me, Ryan Stancl. We came together because of our strong work ethics, our cheeky attitudes, and our passion for creating immersive experiences. In addition to the core team, we ‘outsourced' to two 3D collaborators, Rui Padinha and Eddie Sarabia, and two sound collaborators, Scott Riesterer and Jordan Ivey.
The school - Vancouver Film School - offers would-be designers a year-long intensive course on video game design. Classes range from modeling to storytelling, scripting to level design. This project is the culmination of that course, tying in everything that the students have learned the eight months prior. The main objective is to have a working game finished to present to a theater of industry professionals at the end of 20 weeks.
The preproduction phase was eight weeks, with time allotted to the project only being two days a week due to other classes, and production was 12 weeks. During production all members put in 50-60 hours on the project. Production included five milestones - M1, M2, Alpha, Beta, and Final - for our teachers, industry professional mentors, and us to gauge progress.
This postmortem is to list what went right and what could have went better with the project in order to come up with best practices for future endeavors - future endeavors that will hopefully be within the video game industry as designers.
