Let 'em Cook!

---

The original Q*bert is a classical arcade game that was released in 1982. The game's objective is to have Q*bert hop on all of the cubes and change them to a different color while avoiding enemies. While simple in concept, the game itself is deceptively hard with non-intuitive controls. Yet, Q*bert still managed to be one of the most popular arcade games of all time despite its difficulty. This is what I had to replicate in one week.

This game was created for the Lightning Game Round of the National High School Game Academy at Carnegie Mellon University. Our team was assigned to remake Q*bert in one week, and add a twist to it if we had the time.

Playing the original Q*bert, we found out that most of the game's fun came from its challenging controls, simple sound design, and enemies. We decided to remake the game in 3D because we thought that would be easier instead of trying to replicate the isometric psuedo-3D effect in 2D. Looking back, 2D probably would have been a lot easier.

Progression

While progress was initially going well, 3 days into the week we ran into version control issues. A large portion of our progress was reverted due to our team's inexperience using Perforce (a supposedly better version control for game development). This pushed back our development deadlines far so art assets, sounds, and features like the main menu were not implemented until the last couple of days.

The biggest issue we ran into on the programming side was Coily (the pathfinding snake). There were a myriad of issues with getting to snake to properly follow the player that were not even fully fixed until the last day. However, in the end after sleepless nights, our game and presentation were finally finished. We even were able to add a flashing lights mechanic that made it harder for the player to see Q*bert during random times.

Takeaways

Although I learned a lot about team development and programming, I learned more about myself and my capabilities more than anything else. I still vividly remember during interim (the midway point of development) when our team and game got berated. After interim, I worked nonstop and our team were able to pull through with a fully finished product. I'm very proud of the project and my team for pulling through.