Introduction

All right. You're going to make your first major video game. You have a team of ten students, three months of pre-production followed by three months of production, and your game concept is... karaoke platforming?

At the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA), this odd idea became our Master of Science thesis project and consumed our lives for more than six months in the process. We went into it thinking it would be a piece of cake - a slightly longer extension of the many two-week rapid prototype games we had already done over the course of our first semester.

However, if you're a veteran of the gaming industry (or you've read a few of these write-ups in your time), you can probably guess what happened next; we were proven very, very wrong, and I'm going to tell you how. We were able to take our unique design from its naïve beginnings to a polished success, and what we learned along the way was invaluable.

Welcome to the Postmortem for Opera Slinger.

Background

FIEA, located in downtown Orlando, is brand-new. So new, in fact, that we were its second class, and when we arrived, the first class was only a semester ahead of us. FIEA was founded by the University of Central Florida's School of Film & Digital Media with urging from Electronic Arts (EA's Tiburon division is located nearby). It's staffed by veterans from EA, Disney, Microsoft, and many more, and is designed to replicate a working experience in the industry over the course of its 16-month program.

In the final week of our first semester, all seven student producers pitched game concepts of their own design to their fellow classmates. Once the pitches were complete, all non-producers voted for their favorites. My presentation for Opera Slinger received the highest ranking and, along with the second place finisher (Danger Zone - an educational firefighting game created in cooperation with Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training, & Support), was chosen for production over the course of the following two semesters.

Opera Slinger was pitched as a cross between Mario 64 and Karaoke Revolution. It was designed as a third-person action adventure in which attacks and abilities would be activated by the player's voice, rather than a button press. Featuring the trials of Forte, Opera Slinger Extraordinaire, it was intended to be set in worlds inspired by various musical genres (Rock World, Classical World, Country World, etc.), giving it enough scalability to have as many levels as we had time to build. Playful, bombastic, and filled with operatic destruction, it was meant to have a quirky sense of character from the get-go.

We had our concept, a team of four producers, four programmers, and two artists, and we were ready to begin. After a short two-week break between the semesters, we returned to school and began to accomplish... well... very little.