Tom Rader : All Game

Mr. Pinchy

Project Facts

• Two month team project
• Four Man Team
• 2D Puzzle game

Responsibilities and Contributions as Project Lead

• Schedule Management
• Animation system with editor
• Level Creation
• Midi Jukebox (60+) tracks
• Asset collection (excludes Mr. Pinchy Robot assets)
• Xbox 360 Input
• Wii Remote integration (assisted)

Mr. Pinchy was a game that was based on a design idea for a rail shooter. The final product features nine levels that all provide a unique gameplay experience for the player. You play as Mr. Pinchy and manipulate his claws to grab items and move them around. Trigger pressure can cause items to be destroyed. This game supports Xbox 360 controller input, keyboard input, and Wii Remote input. The Wii Remote support was done using the library WiiYourself.

Post-Mortem/Project Narrative:
During this project, I held the role of project lead and managed schedules for team and contributed a lot to the code base. I also created and updated the game’s documentation.

I found this project to be particularly challenging. The team was working pretty smoothly and making all milestones with really solid builds. However, after our Tech Demo milestone, Team dynamics became a big problem and being in constant crunch only made things worse. A certain member of the team continually came to meetings with nothing done and nothing to show as any attempt to complete anything. The team tended to push our weaker programmers very hard and that eventually frustrated them and didn’t help progress at all. Work wasn’t getting done and we got ripped apart in a milestone meeting at Alpha because we only had two out of ten levels finished. We had one week before our Beta milestone and we were way behind. The entire team was frustrated and bitter, but this was only evident to each individual. Our communication up to this point was sub-par.

Having nearly failed our Alpha milestone we knew we had to come up with a solution to our dwindling level count and fast. Knowing that I didn’t have time to re-write every level, I adapted an existing level’s functionality to fit for different levels that contained different gameplay. This opened up a lot of time and actually stabilized the game’s core. It removed the potential bugs that could exist from writing a different version of the same module more than once.

We really pushed hard into Beta and actually got nine out of our ten levels completed. They aren’t super polished, but they are in there and functioning with the exception of the fighter level. We also got the Wii Remote functioning partially correct, but we had trouble taking into account the rotation of the Wii Remote when trying to emulate a cursor on-screen. Our method was correct, but we kept experiencing an error where the game would just hang and get stuck somewhere inside the library we were using.

Overall, Mr Pinchy was a very educational project. It definitely taught me that if I have a problem with a team member, to address it right away. I also learned about the Wii Remote, XInput (360 controller), the many benefits of code re-use, and how far persistence will take you. Our team was pretty weak on the technology side, but we were still able to produce an amazing 2D puzzle game despite all of our problems with each other and technology. I recommend the defender level. It’s the most fun J.

Screens