Introduction
Want to make a game industry pro laugh? Tell them you're going to design and create a fully functional 3-D video game with a 12-person team in about four months. Oh, they'll bust a gut and laugh and laugh and call their friends on the coast, who'll shout through the speakerphone "Will anything move in your little game?" Yeah, it cracks ‘em up big time.
But that's exactly what we did. We were the few, the proud, the stubbornly naïve... the first graduating class of The Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA). This is the Postmortem for our Master's of Science thesis project, The Blob.
Background
Based in the heart of downtown Orlando, FIEA was founded by the University of Central Florida's School of Film & Digital Media with input from Electronic Arts and other industry partners (EA's Tiburon division is located in nearby Maitland). Staffed by veterans from EA, Microsoft and Disney, FIEA offers an accredited Master's of Science in Interactive Entertainment for programmers, artists and producers focused on game design. The third semester of the 16-month program requires a massive group video game project that attempts in every way (except schedule length) to mimic industry work conditions, right down to toiling ridiculous hours to meet weekly milestones.
Our big project started on the final day of the first semester as four student producers pitched original game concepts to classmates and FIEA faculty. My project—The Blob—was selected for production, partially because, as Professor Rick Hall later explained, it was the most "scalable" idea presented. We didn't really understand the importance of scalability and only later came understand how Professor Hall—a 15-year industry veteran with credits on everything from Basshunter 64 to Ultima Online—was looking out for us. By the end of this trip, we'd figure out an expensive way to say thanks.
As I pitched it, The Blob was a cross between Marble Blast and Katamari with a cartoonish look inspired by artist Peter Max and The Powerpuff Girls. It featured a cranky, wise-cracking lead creature who transformed between five different viscosities—from Superball to Hot Snot—in order to solve landscape puzzles and fend off attacks from creatures intent on eating The Blob. Tone words for the game were movement, puzzle-solving, cannibalism and FUN (my inexperience as a game designer showed early—puzzle-solving and FUN really aren't tone words). I imagined The Blob as a Nintendo-style game, light-hearted and wacky, something a seven-year-old could enjoy as much as the parent playing with them, though maybe for different reasons.
With our project selected, the team - four producers, three programmers and five artists - hunkered down build a game bigger than anything we'd done before using an engine we'd never seen before. We had no idea what we were getting into or good sense might have told us to stop right there.
