Antithesis
Game Summary
Antithesis is an asynchronus 1v1 competitive game, where one player is in VR, attempting to gather components for a ritual to destroy a witch that's tormenting a destroyed village.
Said witch is being controlled by the other player, who has an overhead view of the map on the computer's main display, and can summon minions to try and defeat the VR player before
they can complete the ritual. This game was completed by a team of 20 students for Game Studio, a course offered by Northeastern that gives students an opportunity to create a game with the
supervision of a professor.
My Roles and Contributions
Given that the production of this game was overseen by a professor, everyone on the team was assigned roles based on preference. I was assigned the role of lead designer for the project,
meaning I was responsible for quite a few things. On top of your typical responsibilities like game concepts, prototyping, playtesting, balancing, etc. I was also responsible for the upkeep
of the design log and various deliverables lists for the other teams. Being the leader, I also delegated tasks to the rest of my team, and was the go-to person for any communications between
design and any other team.
I was also assigned to the sound team as a secondary role. For this role, I created a few of the sound effects that can be heard in game, in particular the creature sounds.
Production and Challenges
This game was created over the course of a ~3 month semester. Many challenges came up with this game over the course of its development cycle. The concept of an asynchronus VR game
was agreed upon by the whole class, so when my team and I got to work we set out to create two very different playing experiences for both parties: the VR player should feel nervous
and the PC player should feel powerful. Throughout our 3 prototypes, and all of our playtests, this was our primary objective, and we figured we could worry about balance later. After a pretty
bad initial prototype, where the VR player had access to weapons and things like that, we landed on a balance we were proud of with the second one. This lead into the creation of the third and final
prototype, which I know both myself and my team were the most proud of. We created it in Minecraft! Using command blocks, custom potions, and custom mob spawn eggs, we were able to accurately reflect
the gameplay of the digital version of the game far better than either of the paper prototypes. We built the whole map by hand, and it was actually an extemely fun team bonding experience, on
top of it being productive. Near the end of the semester, everything started to come together on the final version, and I spent a lot of time in the Northeastern VR Lab with the programming team, testing
and tweaking values on the monsters, potions, traps, and everything to make sure the game felt as balanced as possible. Overall, I'm very satisfied with how it came out, considering it was made by some
students who had never worked in VR before.
Links
Download (Google Drive)
Postmortem
