[Brendan Wesolowski and three other Full Sail students have developed a game called Endless Wave, which they have submitted to the 2009 IGF Student Competition. As part of an exclusive series covering the IGF Student Competition, GameCareerGuide has a rapid-fire postmortem of their game, where they share what went right and wrong in about 1,000 words.]

Endless Wave is a fast-paced game of sound and color. Control sound to destroy enemies to hear each level's unique songs. Get hit, and the music stops.

In Endless Wave, the player controls a colored ring in the center of the map, representing a "sound wave," while enemies come in from the sides. Both the player and enemies have one of four colors, which determines what they can hit. Only like colors collide (the player can be hit by any color).

At set time intervals, both the player and any enemies on the screen emit a pulse of their respective colors, which goes a certain distance then fades out. If two waves with the same color collide, the stronger wave overrides the weaker wave and keeps going, though its power is reduced. Hitting an enemy with a pulse of its color destroys it and earns the player points, whereas being hit by any color causes the player to lose points. If multiple enemies are killed without the player being hit, a score multiplier begins to increase.

Four music tracks are played in each level, one for each color, and being hit stops that color's music for a time. After each level, players can play back music from the level to see how they did.

In the beginning, both the player and enemies only have one layer of color. At later levels, this increases up to four. To destroy enemies at this phase, all of their colors must be matched (order does not matter). For example, an enemy consisting of red, blue, and two green layers would need to be hit by a wave with red, blue, and two green layers.

There are also special terrain features that either help or hinder the player:

• amplifier, a grey target -- doubles the power of waves shot through it
• damper, a white target -- halves the power of waves shot through it
• reflector, a gray-white square -- bounces any wave that hits it
• distorter, a white spiral -- changes the color of any wave shot through it
• resonator, a grey diamond -- when hit it shoots waves of the same color as those that hit it.

The player has a cone (displayed as two lines), which affects the power of waves shot through it. Essentially, it boosts the power of waves that are shot from within the cone --the narrower the cone, the fewer waves are affected but the more powerful they are. This is the player's main method of punching through enemy waves. Players also have the ability to alter the frequency at which waves are shot: the faster they shoot, the weaker they are, and vice versa. Finally, the player has a charge shot. By not shooting waves for a period of time, the player can shoot a super-powerful wave.

What Went Right
1. Team harmony. The team worked incredibly well together. We all did our work quickly and got everything done, and done right. We never got into a fight, and we all were willing to put in the hours to meet our deadlines.

2. Planning led to polishing. We scheduled very well, and were able to finish all our features in time for beta. This let us focus on polishing the game and fixing bugs, and it really helped to improve our gold build.

3. Modular design. We were able to use a very modular design for the game and make it expandable. We finished the core gameplay early on in the project and could focus more on adding features and improving the core game mechanics.

4. Accidentally ahead of schedule. One unexpected thing that helped us was that we were told the wrong schedule. We thought the entire project had to be feature-complete a full week early. On top of that, our deadline for that milestone was bumped up two more days. Because of that, we had more time than expected to fix bugs.

5. Few distractions. The group worked very diligently on the project. Whenever we scheduled ourselves to work, we worked for 90 percent of the time. In fact, we forgot to take breaks on the majority of the days. Of course, this diligence was helped by our choice of workspace. We did not have any sort internet collection or a television around, so we had no effective distractions at hand.