At our first design meeting in the summer of 2007, five of us, all students from Bloomfield College, New Jersey, gathered to discuss what kind of game we would make for our senior year project, the culminating experience for all game design students at the school.

We talked about the possibility of working in several genres. Making a massively multiplayer online game would be too much work in the little time we had, and working in all 3D was too advanced and "hardcore" for us.

We decided to build a 2D side-scrolling action game set in medieval times, with some key elements in 3D. The game is called Rage of the Elements.

The Team
Thomas Hajcak, the programmer, was in charge of coding and was basically the backbone of the game's development. He used a pre-existing Java game engine, Golden T, so he had more time to work on the gameplay itself.

Mario Ramales, the artist, came up with the concepts and drew every background. He worked long hours and many days to get the right look and feel of each level.

Cory Armstrong was the 3D modeler and was also in charge of the music and sound effects. He modeled the main character and boss character in 3D to give it some substance in the 2D world. He also created sound loops that play in the background of every level and the title screen.

Josh Kotkin was in charge of promoting the game for the final demo night held at Bloomfield and designing the plush toys and t-shirts that we gave away there.

I was in charge of making sure everyone did his tasks on time so we weren't behind on any of the work. I updated the production schedule and game design document every week that we met.

What Went Right
1. Artistic consistency. Going into the project, we knew that if anything changed in terms of programming or storyline, the art style would drive us home.

Mario Ramales did such a great job with the look and feel of the whole game that players don't really need to be told the storyline in order to get the game.

In each level, the look and feel is consistent -- it's medieval throughout -- but there is variety in the backdrops, too: a dungeon, a town square, and an eerie lake.

To get the game to look medieval across all these settings, Ramales did a lot of research online, studying medieval castles, weapons, people, landscapes, and clothing. We tried to be as accurate as we could with the period, instead of reverting to a fantasy-style game.

2. Cutting down to our goals. In order to finish the game on time, we had to make many production-time changes, which is the euphemistic ways of saying we had to cut stuff.

What went right is that we kept our main objectives clear when making cuts, a primary one being to keep the quality bar high. For example, we had originally planned three more bosses and two more locations that were cut from the game, but it was more important to us to make three levels that were totally polished than five that would be sub-par. It was more important for us to develop one final boss that we are excited to show off than to have four bosses that we're embarrassed to show.

Since we did make a lot of changes to the game, the production schedule and game design document had to be updated constantly. A few issues we didn't take into account, such as marketing and making a behind-the-scenes video were done at the last minute. Originally, we were going to put a dream cinematic in the beginning of the game to help move the storyline, but it got replaced by the behind-the-scenes video because it was quicker and easier to do. The dream sequence would have required a lot of 3D work and art time taken away from the game, which we weren't willing to sacrifice.