Bossmen

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Abstract
Game Title:	Bossmen
Development Team Members:	Jason Meistrich, Vijay Prakash
Game Genre:	Action/Adventure maybe?
Brief Description:	Most student games tend not to have boss fights because they run out of time and want to focus their resources on more central parts of the game. Bossmen was made to combat this as a game that contains nothing but boss fights. Your character is simply a guy with a jetpack and a laser gun that can pick a series of levels, each of which is a single boss fight. The challenge, variety, and fun of the game comes from these fights.
Overview
Game Story / Objective:	No story here - just kill the bosses before they kill you.
Game Mechanics + Controls:	Every level in the game employs either a circular camera, where the boss is at the center and the player rotates around them, or a fixed camera where the boss and player are in a square level. The player moves around using W, A, S, and D, with space or the right mouse button to jetpack and move upward. Players shoot their laser by aiming with the cursor and clicking the left mosue button.
Technology:	The game uses Mogre (the managed port of Ogre3D) for rendering, Newton for physics, and FMOD for sound. Notable technical features include a compositor for a full screen glow effect and particle effects in all of the levels.
Aesthetics:	In terms of overall game aesthetics, we wanted to keep things simple, with blocky textures throughout. As such, all the bosses are modeled out of some sort of cubic structure with simple textures and few animations, harkening back to the "old school" style of gaming. Also, most of the game's music is 8-bit (although in retrospect, we felt this didn't really fit what we were going for). We also had some issues with animations where the artists made animations for their models without us knowing which led to more of them in the game than we originally intended.
Media
Screenshots:	Some pictures of the game are in the index_files folder in the web directory: mole.jpg - The mole boss rails.jpg - The rails level music.jpg - The music level explosion.jpg - The sweet explosion effect when a boss dies
(Optional) Download:	A download link will be available on the GCS site in a little while, once we finish polishing some things and "officially" finish the game.
Development Summary
CODE:	When starting the game, we had the Creation Engine, a game engine written earlier by Jason that is based on top of Ogre3D and a level loader. From here, we created several levels ourselves (in particular, Laser Barf (D. Face), the music level, the rails level, Three Eye, the snake, and the volcano, as well as significant modifications to the mole level and the hive level where the original code was written by other people. On top of this, we made several key changes to the engine, including adding support for particle effects and changing how the levels were compiled to ease development. We also made several changes to how physics were handled in the engine to make player and boss movement more correct.
CONTENT:	As above, most of the level data was either written by or heavily edited by us. Most of the game models, textures, and sounds were made by artists and musicians from GCS under our supervision, and some of these were also edited/fixed by us. We created the particle effects ourselves using Ogre's particle editor.
Reflections
Three Greatest Challenges:	There honestly weren't many technical challenges during development. The hardest parts of making the game were coming up with interesting boss designs and implementing the designs we had come up with within the simulated physics world we were working with. The only real technical challenges we encountered were things like figuring out the physics of making characters move correctly in a circle. Thanks to the choice of C# and Mogre, development on the whole was a very easy process.
Three things that went right:	1. The game looks nice - We both feel that the end product we produced is fairly polished and looks extremely pretty. Between all the particle effects and the simple shaders we added, the game has a very cool artistic combo of low tech boss models with high tech looking lasers and explosions and particle effects that make for a really awesome visual theme. 2. Some of the bosses are a lot of fun - The bosses that went well during the development process came out a lot of fun. The music level is challenging and has a great background tune that makes it really cool to play through and try to stay alive. Similarly, the mole level's very cohesive looks and interesting/challenging boss made it one of the best. We made a pretty cool system to split a box into 4 pieces when it's shot for the infinitum (rails) level which is a lot of fun to play with. We also really like the hive level and three-eye (when it's working correctly, which it does now). 3. Development was very easy - There were a lot of factors that made development very easy. The choice of C# made the code simple to write and debug. On top of this, it allowed us to do things like dynamically reload scripts, materials, and particles without recompiling or even closing the game which made things really easy to change and test on the fly. The Creation Engine and the framework we built to create levels also made it really easy to add new bosses, both for us and the other developers that worked on the project.
Three things that went wrong:	1. Some bosses weren't designed until after they modeled - We had an original list of 20 or so boss ideas that were really cool. However, early in the process, some of the artists made boss models that weren't actually related to these ideas. We spent a long time working on the models and getting them to work with our framework and then in the last week or so realized that we didn't have a level design. This was a pretty huge failure in terms of design and we ended up with a poorly designed level for this particular boss. 2. Animations caused troubles - As mentioned earlier, we had some issues where artists made animations for their boss models without us knowing. This led to there being a lot of animations in the finished game when the original plan was to barely have any and to use texture mapping to "animate" the bosses. The laser barf level is what we had originally planned, where he shows his shooting animation simply by changing his face texture. However, this isn't really what happened in the end. 3. Failure of rapid development cycle - We had originally planned to do a boss every two weeks and if it wasn't done by then, throw it out and work on the next one. Instead of this, we basically ended up making starter versions of a ton of bosses for the first 5 weeks and then trying to finish them all in the last two. This led to a huge crunch in the last couple weeks of development time because we realized we barely had any of the bosses "code complete."
Other final thoughts:	We both learned some things from this project about working in a team, which in our case included both of us as well as a couple other artists/programmers. There were some interesting coordination, scheduling, and overall game design issues that arose from this, in particular keeping the game going along with our original vision of what we wanted it to be.