Cooper's Cleanup
Cooper's Cleanup is a top-down collect-a-thon. You play as C.O.O.P.E.R, a robot vacuum who is moving around a home, "cleaning" up the collectibles hidden throughout the level. However, C.O.O.P.E.R is new to his environment, and needs some time to find his way around.
Overview
Cooper's Cleanup is the project I worked on for my sophmore game class. The game is built within a custom built C++ engine the team worked on. The project was worked on for 8 months. I worked as a programmer and producer for this project. On the programming side, I mostly worked on tools and engine architecture.
Skills
- C++: The base game and it's engine are written entirely in C++.
- Tools Programming: I implemented an editor into the engine to enable designers to manipulate game objects within the level in real-time.
- Engine Programming: I worked on implementing messaging and deserialization into the engine. Messaging enables various game objects to communicate with one another without having to directly reference each other. Deserialization allows the engine to read in data from outside the executable itself, allowing for dynamic object placement within levels.
- Task Delegation: As the producer, I worked with to team establish priority tasks to complete the game and worked with the other leads to hand out the tasks to other team members.
Team
The team consisted of 5 programmers, 3 game designers, and an audio designer. I served as a tools and engine programmer for this project. I also acted as the producer for this project.
Lessons
- Pacing a project is key: The biggest challenge of this project was to build an engine and a game at the same time. Because of this, the end of the project caused a large struggle of getting in the last required features and polishing up the elements we currently had. If I could go back in time, I would work with each department to set earlier cut offs to allocate the proper time for polishing up the necessary items.
- Communication between departments: Being the producer, I had a fairly firm grasp of what was needed in all aspects of the project. This was not true for all of the team. Sometimes, certain design decisions would slip past the tech team, or maybe a sound effect would decided to be cut without the designers hearing of it. Once we caught wind of this aspect, we were able to rectify it by including disciplines in other meetings to notify one another of changes. From this experience, I learned each department needs to establish pipelines to communicate with other departments on the changes that are established and be transparent with their teammates if things fall through.
Demo and Downloads
You can download Cooper's Cleanup on Steam here!