Manage a band of Dinosaurs to show off their talents while remaining alive!
About the Project
Mesozoic Melodies was made by a team of 6 students for the University of Utah’s Traditional Game development course. I was the main programmer for this Unreal Engine game.
The Design
Initially this was presented to us a kind of rhythm game. We had no sound designers on our team, so we quickly scrapped this idea. Instead, we decided to focus on the band management side of things putting the player in the sound booth at a stage, controlling the lights and the tracks that the dinosaurs played. We went for a stress management style game. We wanted to immerse the player in the theatre setting of the game by making them spin the curtain wheel to open the stage, at the start of each game
Score Calculation
Since we were going for a stress management style game this required defining the win and loss states for the game. As the sole programmer in this project I took it upon myself to both define and develop the way that the different scores were calculated. The game comes down to managing these two scores to make sure that they are both out of the red as much as possible. Every few ticks the score is updated along with these other scores. Once the score is over 5,000 the player may end the game and win.
The large square buttons control the spotlights over each of the dinosaurs on stage. The circular buttons each control what track is being played in the game. We used in game labels as well as color coding to help the player associate each button with its particular function.
This video shows a game played from start to death in the final build of our game. Victory is a bit difficult as we werent able to get the balance right before the team dissolved at the end of the semester.
