Throughout Q1 and Q2 of 2021, I was privileged to be able to work with UCI's Video Game Development Club to assemble a team to get some indie development going. Not wanting to miss the chance to strike while the iron was hot (I had a paper prototype for the game that would become Necroncide Arena as well as 2 years of experience developing in Unity and nearly 3 in 3D modeling) I poured countless hours into the pitch, laid out development goals over Trello and created a Discord server for team comms. The recruitment process was rocky. The lockdown was still in full swing, attendance during livestreamed meetings were middling, but the club provided opportunities through multiple channels to reach out to prospective student recruits which included pitching my project at LCAD's own game development club.
The team was assembled over the span of the first half of the year with Tyler Kaplan
landing a spot on the team as a programmer. For the first five weeks, it would just be the two of us hard at work to port a work-in-progress gameboard prototype into a video game. Many deep design choices were changed on the fly reflecting on the inexperience we came in with. Necroncide went from a top-down turn-based strategy game (reminiscent of XCOM) to a turn-based third person shooter (a la Valkyria Chronicles).
Because we were two manning the project at the time, we also shifted focus from working on more innovative ideas like the Tactics system which would have been a deckbuilder/hero skills amalgamation of sorts to instead creating staples like a solid camera system as well as a user friendly input system. Tyler also threw his hat in the ring by sorting out issues with version control. I was inexperienced with Github and mostly use the desktop app to to handle pull and push request and he used the command line. Most of the issues presided from modifying the .gitignore file which created merge issues because we hadn't purged some of the files that were supposed to be ignored from the repository beforehand. In addition, we were pushing a slew of generated files that were relevant only on our respective local machines and subsequently pulling those files which caused a lot overwrites that caused file corruption.
In the end we formed a protocol for avoiding version control nightmares by working in separate .scene files and avoiding modifications to mutually dependent scripts without signing off our work and passing it off the other to work on in tandem or individually on scheduled dates and times. When all the pieces fell into place it was like a trashcan fire had been turned into a warming bonfire.
Joining our team in the 5th week was LCAD-enrolled artist Celine Coté who brought a level of depth to our assets with her skill in 3D modeling. As the sole artist on the team up to that point, it was difficult to keep up with demands especially with my knowledge gaps in nature assets. Fortunately her addition to the team meant that we could make the desert environment of our map more 'deserty.' She also impressed with her weapon modeling ability and was able to pick up on content that would've otherwise been cut. An additional challenge for bringing onboard another artist was to fast track my plans for the rendering pipeline. I settled on Unity's URP Metallic pipeline as it was lightweight and generally painless to work with (although the project still suffers from conflicts between URP materials and Unity's built-in foliage painting tool).
Our final addition to the team is UCR alumnus Nat Perez who assisted on sound design. Because of overhead with time (we were well into week 7 of 10), we were only able to integrate a few of the sounds he had created (including gunshots, character reactions and footsteps) while I hunted down public domain sounds (ambience, music, etc.) to holdover what would have otherwise been in awkward void but I gained an incredible insight to how he created his sfx which involved practicalities, ie hunting down a sound source, recording it and mixing it. We shared a few laughs along the way trying to convey the sounds we needed for the project at that step.
In 10 weeks, we were able to hack together a turn-based third person game wherein the players controlled respective teams of 3. On their turn, a player would be able to switch seamlessly across their team members and perform (thus far) one of two actions: move or shoot. Both players would have to huddle at the same screen because it was a local multiplayer game, harking back to days when games came with a splitscreen mode.
I cutoff work at the end of week 8 knowing the importance of reserving plenty of time for testing and unsurprisingly, the first build was plagued with issues including freezing at the end of a game, endgame conditions not being considered and initially a bug with order of operations issues that broke the camera. These bugs were considerably difficult to fix because they did not reflect what ran in-engine. In spite of our frustrations, Tyler and I managed to conduct ourselves in an orderly manner and fix every bug before the club-wide demo. Some were of course, duct tape solutions but understanding that this was a very early build, committing too much to ironing out every issue was pointless.
I am truly astonished and proud of my team for going into this project with all cylinders firing. I kept expectations low for recruits but some team put in nearly 20 hours a week to make their weekly contribution! I believe without a doubt that had it not been for this group's dedication and passion, Necroncide Arena would have not made it in time for the club demo or worse, been shelved. It has been a privilege to lead a team of extremely bright future artists and engineers.
THE FUTURE OF NECRONCIDE
I've expressed interest to club leadership in pursuing an additional quarter of development. During the initial sit down with producers, we had projected that the game would need two quarters to be presentation ready. We did it with one, but at the cost of cut content. I truly believe that by the end of this year, Necroncide Arena will be in shipshape- at least as shipshape as can be for a student project.
I've also expressed interest to team members in converting Necroncide to a realtime third person wave shooter (in the vein of the Zombie Army and CoD Zombies games). I think this will be a worthwhile pursuit beyond the scope of a school project but that remains to be seen. ■
You can access our game here for FREE.
Special thanks to UCI Video Game Development Club and especially Production Director, Victoria Winn for helping organize our team.
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