Over the past week, I was assigned to recreate and re-theme a classical arcade game released in the "Golden Age of Arcade Games". I was assigned four random teammates, creating a team of 5. I had the role as a programmer, while my teammates consisted of two artists, a sound designer, and another programmer. We had to recreate and re-theme Q*bert.
If you don't know who or what Q*bert is, you have definitely seen him before. He's a very recognizable character due to his cute face and iconic long, orange nose. Q*bert further popularized using #!&@% and likewise symbols as a shorthand for cursing. In Q*bert, the goal of the game is to change every tile into a target color by hopping on it while avoiding various enemies.
When our team was deciding how to re-theme Q*bert, we realized that whenever Q*bert hopped on a tile and changed its color, he basically painted it. We decided to exaggerate that idea and turned Q*bert into a painter. We created a whole backstory for Q*bert, turning him into a broke painter who was hallucinating from not getting enough sleep. taking a lot of inspiration from Splatoon. Now, here is a somewhat dramatic reminiscence of my experience over the past week.
Initially, our team had a lot of great ideas. We were thinking of new, crazy mechanics that would be impressive and innovative if implemented. However, knowing we had to remake the original game mechanics first, we put off most of those ideas to the side. Development was going well until 2 days before the interim. Due to our group having little experience with this new version control we learned called Perforce, my programmer accidentally reverted a lot of the progress I made on that day. I've always wished I had a team I could work with to develop games, but the day my progress was deleted was when I realized working in a team was not all rainbows and sunshine.
At the interim, every group received feedback. Out of all of the criticism and backlash we received from TAs, one comment from the head professor stuck out to me. "The general vibe I'm getting from you guys is that you don't like Q*Bert".
The next two days of development, I worked almost every hour of the day on the game, starting from 9am to 3am. There was a lot of stress and tension between my entire team up until the last day, but we managed to get our re-themed and recreation of Q*bert in the very end. Our final presentation was live streamed to everybody in the program and to our parents. In the end, lots of people were impressed, especially because of how our game looked just two days before.
Although the final product wasn't exactly the vision of what I wanted to create, considering the technical issues I had, I have to say our recreation was a success. We even had a one minute cutscene at the beginning of the game. I'm very proud of my team, and I'm glad I was put into a group with them (even though one of them accidentally reverted my work).
At the time of writing this, I have not posted Brok*bert on my portfolio yet. I'll try to get that as soon as possible so you guys can actually see the final product.