GCG Feature: 'Student Postmortem: Eye of Yadubaku'

The latest feature for Gamasutra sister educational site Game Career Guide presents a postmortem of Eye of Yadubaku, made by a team of game art design undergrads at the Art Institute of San Diego. The game is a a first person adventure that offers the player a journey of discovery through a rich environment similar to Myst or King's Quest. In this excerpt, team member Aaron Canaday comments on how the team managed the project from the start by keeping their ambitions manageable, rather than succumb to the pitfall of over-ambition that plagues many similar student efforts: “It seems that over-ambition was the biggest culprit in troubled student prototype projects of the past. We learned this from the valuable advice of our academic director Linda Selheim and our instructors Asa Enochs and Treit Ton. They did a great job in cautioning us to keep our project ambitions manageable from the beginning and throughout the process. Overall our level was divided into 3 nodes: a jungle area, a courtyard space and a temple. We really wanted all of the areas to have a well populated feel, so making the maps a manageable size was a huge priority for us and in the end it really paid off. The area that benefited the most from this approach was the jungle area. We all felt a little nervous about getting the forest to look lush and dense and it was the smaller map size that allowed us to accomplish this look. Another successful initiative was focusing on developing assets that could be reused in clever ways instead of building multiple custom pieces. Jason Touchman spearheaded this initiative.” You can read the entire postmortem now, which includes a detailed insight into the development successes and difficulties that went into creating Eye of Yadubaku (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).