Dominion

Dominion was a 5 month project that I worked on at Full Sail with 5 other people. It was the last thing we did before graduation, and was a culmination of our education up to that point. It was a grueling 5 months, but in the end it was worth it. I learned a lot about game development and even more about working on a game with a team.

The first 2 months of development were purely design. The first month focused on producing documentation that outlined the basics of the game we wanted to make,and what we were hoping to achieve. The second month focused on producing more technical documentation. We outlined our system architecture, and the basic layout and features of all game systems. We also developed a 3 month work schedule using Gnatt. We broke down all of our systems into 1-5 day tasks, and laid out our entire schedule for the next 3 months.

The next 3 months were spent coding the game. We worked 8 hours a day, 6 days a week to finish in time for our final turn in. Along the way we had many milestones to achieve, such as Alpha, Beta, and Gold. The days leading up to those milestones were always hectic as we strove to meet all of our feature goals for that milestone. After each milestone, we presented the current state of the game to our teachers and fellow students.

I worked on many systems during those 3 months, but I spent most of my time on a select few. Those systems were our AI opponent, the fleet's flocking behavior, a post-process glow effect, and a level editor. The most challenging of these was the glow effect. I had had only a brief introduction to HLSL shaders in our DirectX class, so this was new territory for me. I found a NVIDIA shader that helped me a lot, but I spent a lot of effort just learning how to read HLSL. I had the most fun working on our AI opponent though. AI has always been an area that I enjoy. I spent most of my time developing a Fuzzy Logic system that helped the AI determine what actions he needed to take based on what the player was doing.

After we finished developing Dominion, we presented it in front of our friends, family, and other students. There was about 100 people there, so it was pretty nerve-wracking to speak in front of them all. Thankfully we had practiced so much I knew my speech by heart. We finished up with a short demonstration of the game that everyone enjoyed.

If you are interested in Dominion, there is a link in the links section that will bring you to the installer.

P.S. I'm on the far left in the picture.