On sister educational site
Game Career Guide, FIEA students are presenting
a postmortem of student game Bizarrecraft, a complex PC RTS title.
The game was created over 7 months by a large student game team of around 16, and used the educational license of Emergent's Gamebryo engine. As postmortem author Corey Teblum explains:
"In January of 2008, 16 students at FIEA began their seven-month work on BizarreCraft , a real-time strategy game, with that one driving mentality in mind: we can do this better. Our overarching goal for BizarreCraft was to make a better real-time strategy game. We wanted to try and fix all the problems we saw in the genre.
Yes, it is okay for you to begin laughing. Once we sat down to begin planning the project, we laughed too. Although, as this postmortem will show, we may not have laughed hard enough, as we still tried to do too much to make this better RTS.
Over the course of its 7-month development, BizarreCraft went from being a Command & Conquer clone to a barely functional RTS to an experiment that barely resembled a game. In the end, BizarreCraft used it RTS roots to create a unique world where chimera-like monstrosities battle barely functioning junkyard robots in an attempt to capture their enemies' insane general.
This is the postmortem for BizarreCraft, wherein I will discuss what went right and what went wrong in the 7-month development of the game and what the phrase "We can do it better" does to video game development."
You can now read the
full GameCareerGuide.com postmortem of the title, including lots of technical and design detail on what went right and wrong during its creation.
[In addition, students interested in submitting postmortems of their own projects -- or other opinion pieces and design articles for the site -- should contact [email protected] with information on their proposed article.]
