Capstone Blog Post 11: End of the Road...for now

While Chroma-Throne did not go through into the next semester production due to resource restrictions, I still am happy with what we ended up as the final product. Our game was told by many people that It was enjoyable to play and employed interesting mechanics. QA sessions only made us want to add more features at a quicker pace and we were proud as a team with how polished our prototype ended up being by the end of the semester. Chroma-Throne was a passion project for Mico my other designer and I born out of the interesting mechanic of blending in and out of the background that was your characters color. While we were only able to get three colors implemented into our vertical slice, It was still a fun and engaging proof of concept to us so much so that we intend on continuing development of this game into what we eventually want it do be. Looking back at previous block posts reminded me of just the sheer amount of time of time and effort we put in every week as the game dramatically changed both in quality and technically every week. It’s interesting looking back and see how the project transformed over time.

I learned quite a bit over the course of the development of this game. I learned rudimentary knowledge of shaders and how they work while trying to get the blending to work correctly. I learned a ton of what makes 2D brawler stages fun to play in. I learned how to do novel methods of having players screen-wrap between sides of the screen. I also learned how to learn from a game that had a very similar mechanic such as ours and take what did work and for things that didn’t, expand on those and iterate until they felt cohesive with the rest of the game. Elements such as the territory system we took and added a lot more purpose to it by giving it stage hazards and tied special attacks to these areas. Doing this gave the game a far more arcade y feel and tone to the game and shook up the game play possibilities dramatically. Along with specials we tied weapon charging elements to these color elements as well by having projectiles charge when only in your color and not in other colors. Being more charged also gave your melee attacks more knock back so you felt more powerful. We even added the Chroma-Throne which turned the whole stage to your sides color allowing you to blend in anywhere and have all of the stage hazards on your side.

As a team member I learned how to try and incorporate each aspect of the design both the system from the very back end architecturally all the way to how the design incorporates feedback all in one design decision. Effectively trying to maximize our time on this project as we were without a programmer for this project. Developing the color system back end to scale was probably my favorite contribution to the project. How we ended up calculating the mechanics like the color fading, the color blending, were all based off of taking a list of colliders the player was touching and then adding them to specific lists based off of the color they represented, and the system simply did simple arithmetic to figure out which color your were considered to be in. I learned that in this case scaling midway through the project paid dividends later on in the project as we didn’t have to constantly deal with the old systems bugs due to the Unity trigger system.

We intend on publishing our game on Itch.io in the coming months and continuing development after significant encouragement from friends and faculty. We plan on adding more colors initially and then gradually incorporating more features we intended on having for a while during our production cycle. Things such as mesh cutting allowing for players to cut each others grappling hooks and more avenues to employ juice within the game, a tiered system for the Chroma-Throne, a single player mode against machine learning AI bot players, and more! Eventually adding more stages, and stage dynamics like the chandelier lights in the current game. One of the things that Mico and I set out to do when we first started working on this game was that we just wanted to make something that was fun to play. We went all in on making the game feel good to play and to be honest I think we hit that aspect out of the park. I poured a lot of my soul into the creation of this game and while it didn’t go forward, it’s simply a good indicator to me for the future and simply gratifying that our game was always well received during all of our QA sessions which is not always easy to do. One of the things that definitely could have gone better was establishing our context and visual theme earlier on in the development. I think though that the appeal this game received was a great acknowledgement that local co-op games are here to stay for a while longer after seeing the reactions and games of people who played matches of our game. There is still an element there socially that I’m still glad the online era hasn’t completely gotten rid of. I hope to see the continued success of this game later on after I now put my efforts next semester into working on my new team making Short Giraffe as their systems designer. Where I plan to take all I learned about integrating mechanics in with each other to create a cohesive experience into the new systems work I’ll be doing on Short Giraffe. I still can’t believe how quickly we iterated on this concept and how much it grew from just black and white into what it is today.