Blade ballet - Released August 2016
dreamsail games
November 2015 - November 2016
Blade Ballet was a true passion project for many at DreamSail games, or at least it was for me. We didn’t have any designers, so everyone played a part in prototyping and designing characters, levels and game modes. Unfortunately we weren’t able to make the game a financial success due to several mistakes we made, but it is a game I will always look back on fondly.
My Role
I was initially one of 2 programmers on a team that grew to 4 by the release. I was involved in virtually every aspect of the game’s development and as a result I worked on characters and abilities, levels and stage mechanics, user interface elements, game modes, and networking.
Technology
Unity Engine
Challenges
This was my second ever game project, and the first project that I worked on from start to finish. One of the major challenges we had to deal with throughout the entire project was learning how to plan for tasks so that they would have an appropriate amount of time but also so that we could properly design and iterate on ideas. My personal opinion is that many of the features that shipped with the game were underdeveloped or maybe even could have been replaced with other ideas, but we had no process to really make those decisions. Another major challenge was networking the game. We did not decide to implement online multiplayer until well into the game’s development (which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do) and as a result we had to find a cheap way to implement replication that wouldn’t require us to rewrite all of our existing gameplay code. Unfortunately the result was less than stellar, and many users complained that the online was ‘laggy’.