A turn based tactical game, played on a hex board.
The goal of this project was to create a game with a team using the custom engine we developed in the last couple of blocks. We had a team of 16 people, five of the six programmers previously worked on the engine project called Hex Engine.
Our engine made it possible to rapidly develop hex tile based games using LUA as scripting language. We had to pitch our engine to the entire year and get people on board. Because we had a custom engine teachers had placed no extra constraints on our project so we where able to make a game with the engine's constraints. We had no theme restrictions, our target platform was PC, the game had to be a tile based game and had to be networked multi-player.
During the development of Hex Engine I was solo graphics programmer and made the entire graphics engine in DirectX 11. The plan was to continue working on this while we were working on the game and shift my main focus to making sure the artists where able to use the graphics tools provided for them and creating new features and tools if they where not in engine yet.
We also got another graphics programmer joining the team so I needed to help him work with the graphics engine and I became graphics lead. As a lead I needed to provide the other graphics programmer with tasks and keep him up to date. I also needed to communicate with other team members and help them out if there where any issues.
During early development of the game we quickly found out that artists have a hard time with working with primitive rendering tools so I developed a shader based material system. I asked the other graphics programmer to make a bunch of post processing shaders which was already supported by the graphics engine. Once we started making the game we figured we needed particle systems, which is what I added next. In the end we got quite a fun and decent looking game. If I actually developed shader based materials earlier, we would probably have had a better looking game.