Postmortem: Guardians of Neverwood
In early 1987, I found myself glued to my trusty Nintendo Entertainment System with my brother, playing a game called 8 Eyes. The game's premise was fairly simple; gather up the gems and figure out the order they go in, then fight some baddies. The graphics looked just like the original Castlevania at first (and second...) glance. But, for those of you that don't remember it, 8 Eyes was a rarity then and practically unique by today's standards, in that it was a two-player cooperative game. The main character, Orin, has a falcon that accompanied him by the name of Cutrus. In one-player mode, button combinations command Cutrus to perform simple fetch and attack actions, as well as summon him to Orin's shoulder. When the second player joins in, he or she takes over command of Cutrus. As the game requires cooperation between human and bird, so too do the players need to work together.
This same concept was the original basis behind Guardians of Neverwood. Our team agreed that the dearth of cooperative multiplayer games is disturbing, especially for those folks who play games with people they actually like. Once the cooperation aspect was decided, we tried to come up with a niche for the game, and decided ultimately to see if we could make an action game that appealed to women, as well. A team of three guys developing with women in mind, without turning the game into some mutated Barbie world, is something of a challenge. One of the things our team proudly takes from this project is that of the six women we asked to try the game out, every one of them has given us a positive review.
The team started out in March of 2004 with some basic design discussions, with the project's formal design phase to begin in April. We spent the month of April nailing together a 128-page design document, one of the largest on record at Full Sail. As all of the art talent was procured for us by the school, we didn't have an awful lot of concept art to work with, so we ended up scouring the Web for pictures of forestry and fantasy creatures. We'd like to state for the record that there is no decent recording of a falcon screech available anywhere the light of Google touches.
May and June were our official development months. About the best way to adequately sum up those sixty days is that anything that could go wrong, did. Three days before our alpha presentations, we were looking at a black screen. Fortunately for the project, our team never gave up on each other, and we ended up crossing the finish line with at least the beginnings of something we could truly be proud of. I'll discuss some of the specific happenings of this time period further down.
In July and August, the team shrunk by a third, as Chris Winings moved back home to Maryland. Rolf Hendriks and I spent a considerable portion of our free time working on trying to get the features that were left out implemented, and polish up the rest of the game considerably. At some point soon, we're going to need to call the game finished, but I felt we were close enough to justify writing this now.
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