USC Student Game Dev Team Develops a Nintendo DS Game, Part 1

A student team from USC talks about the challenges of developing a game for the Nintendo DS

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Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference at San Francisco, and I’m here with a student development group. How about you introduce yourselves?

Keith: I’m Keith Riley and I’m the team leader of Reflection DS.

Jeff: I’m Jeff Magers. I am programmer and designer for Reflection DS.

Jeremy: I’m Jeremy Jung. I’m one of the co-creators and designer of Reflection DS.

Interviewer: What exactly is this game about?

Keith: So, Reflection DS is a 2D puzzle platform. It’s been on the DS and DSI when it comes out. It’s a platform that you control two characters, one on the top screen and one on the bottom screen. The bottom screen character is a mirror image of the top screen, so you are going to have to go through two levels simultaneously with both characters, and you just need… There’s a unique relationship between the characters that it’s better to be shown.

Interviewer: Sure. Can I see it?

Jeff: I’m not sure how well the video is. The DS is notorious for not really taping that well, so you want to explain why there are mirror images.

Keith: You can see there is a character walking on the top and bottom screen. When she jumps on something on the top screen, it’s just like a normal platform. As you see on the bottom screen there is a tree stump there. If Jeff jumps onto that tree stump, you’ll notice that the top character is now kind of levitating on air. It’s because the relationship between the two characters is that when one character collides with something on the one screen it affects the other character. So, they always maintain the same relative position.

In order to progress through the levels, you need to have both screens almost at the same time in order to get across.

Interviewer: Cool. So, now as students, how do you go about doing such a project and getting started because you have classes and all this other stuff going on?

Keith: It began last year, roughly a year and a couple of months ago when Jeremy and I were in a class at USC called “Intermediate Games Workshop” where you create a game with a small team. At the time me and Jeremy decided to pitch three ideas to the class. They thought Reflections was cool, so we began working on a PC prototype.

After awhile, people thought it was really great so they said that we should pitch it to a panel of people at USC who decide upon three projects at USC which are worked on over a year with a team of members in order to create a game for your senior project. So, we pitched and we won that competition. We assembled a team of 10 or 11 students who worked over the summer.

We started working in the fall and made the DS game and we submitted to IGF in October and November. In the spring the team grew a little bit to 12 or 13, and we continued working on it. We took the feedback from people, and now we’re here.

Jeff: Also, in answer to your question as well, we take it as a class so a fourth of our schedule is this game but it consumes much more time than just one class. It usually does.

Interviewer: Can you guys talk about when you did during the summer. At that point you had 10 or 11 people then?

Keith: Over the summer it’s really hard for students to work because people go home. People are all over the place. We had some people on the East Coast. So, what we did was we had to maintain really good communication, and so we dole out tasks. Some of us had internships. I had an internship, so I had our producer, Hersh, handle most of the design and production side of things and like, these are the types of things we are going to be working on These are the coding, the features and Jeff and Jeremy helped with that.

I was primarily, because I was working, I handled mostly the direction of the art, specifically I worked with our concept artist on the characters, things like that. So, it was a lot of back and forth emails because people were spread out, but it was very important to communicate every day so that things get done and you make progress during the summer. It is very easy to kind of lose sight of things during the summer, you’re just hanging out.

Jeff: And also, since we built the engine from the ground up programming-wise we all knew how the game worked so the programming team went ahead and started thinking of the frameworks of the engine in place during the summer. It wasn’t something we could do without.

Jeremy: It was also important that we had pretty good documentation. We covered everything as we did, and as Keith was saying we pretty much communicated via email. We had some communication threads in our emails back and forth that were pages and pages long, and we’ve had pretty intense conversations about that.

Even if you’re geographically apart and you’re a pretty tight knit team, you always want to have great communication.

Jeff: It definitely makes it harder. We get our best work done when we’re all sitting in the same room and we’re working for hours straight, but we got some good work if we hadn’t worked over the summer.

Interviewer: Did you guys use the Instant Messenger much?

Keith: Yes, we used Instant Messenger a lot. We used specifically Gmail for almost all of our communication and Gmail for all of chat which allowed us to communicate, and so we would have team meetings. We’d schedule a team meeting once a week which we’d have people from all the different disciplines give a status update on what’s going on, what we needed information on, things like that. We used IM, email a lot.

Interviewer: Once a week seems kind of really long. Did you break it up like maybe every three or four days, or was once a week fine?

Keith: It was once a week for the main meetings, but there was communication going on back and forth between meetings every day.

Interviewer: You did the prototype before the summer though?

Keith: The prototype was made in the spring semester.

Jeremy: Yes. We built the prototype at the end of it. We had a very, very early version of the game and then Keith decided hat it was a really great idea to take it further that’s how we got everything together and we decided to take it to the next level.

Interviewer: Then you go into the fall.

Keith: Yep.

Interviewer: So, what was the process there and you said you were doing DS development then?

Keith: So, we had pitched the game with a PC prototype. From the get-go we said this is going to be on the DS. It’s perfect with the two screens. This is what we want to do, and the panel said, you know, it might be a little difficult because it hasn’t been done before, but go for it. See if you can do it.

So, in the fall, it’s part of a class called “Advance Project Class” at USC. It’s a fourth year course and you pretty much come to a work session once a week for three hours and you have a little bit of talk and then you break up into your groups and start working. We had to put in more time than three hours a week, so that kind of acted as our main meeting time.

Because we were part of that class, it also helped because, hey we’re short an artist, and our professor was like, hey let me go to the school of fine arts and see if I can get an artist for you. So then we got an artist from the arts school, and we brought them on board.

We needed some music, so we said, hey let’s go to the department of music. We brought them on board, so it was really great in that because it was a class. The professors were really, really enthusiastic about bringing together all the different disciplines and resources that USC had to offer.

In the fall when we started the game we knew that we couldn’t work on an actual Nintendo DS so we decided to use a whole new development using the [?] libraries. I think Jeff was the programmer, so he can go over that.

Jeff: It definitely was a challenge to tro to figure out how this console worked when none of us had experienced programming for the DS. That was another thing that we really focused on during the summer was getting the engines together, but to do that we needed to figure out how to actually make anything show up on the DS. It was definitely a challenge, but we went into it with the attitude that we’ll get it done no matter what.

Keith: One of the hardest things about starting out was that because we were working on the DS typically in school, it was like, hey you’re going to work on a computer. Do your thing. I have a programming background, and one of the things that I found really funny was that you’re taught to use all of these methods. But, on the DS you only have four megabytes of Ram which means that everything has to be compacted. And so, a lot of our time was spent like, oh man, how are we going to squeeze all of this into the DS card, so that was a lot.

Jeff: Also…

Jeremy: We’re just basically working with our own group that presented its own set of challenges. It took quite awhile to surmount those, but if you’re persistent and stick to it, it all turns out in the end.

Jeff: It had a home [?] environment. You don’t want to knock it because it got us where we are today, and we’ve got a game going on it.