Beer Buddies
8 weeks
Team of 8 people
January 2016
AI, Audio & Music
Unity, Ableton Live
Project Brief
Beer Buddies is both a first game that I made in a real game engine and a first game that I worked on with a team. Our task was to take any game from the 1980's and remake it with our own twist. The team went with my suggestion to remake the original Metal Gear(1987). After almost a week of discussion we decided to twist the game to be local-coop, and turn around the theme from a serious one about war to a goofy one about two alcoholic gnomes escaping from women to a bar.
Project Result
Beer Buddies was a huge success. When we showed our game, everybody loved what we did and were having a good laugh playing the game. In fact, everybody loved our game so much, that when students at NHTV were asked to vote for best game in first year, we won all four categories - Art, Design, Programming, and overall Best game.
During 8 weeks of development we made tools for level creation, three levels, and a tutorial. I would say that for our first try, and considering the timeframe that we were given, Beer Buddies is a great result.
My Contribution
AI
I was the person responsible for coming up with the AI design, and implementing it. Among all other first-time things that I did for this game, this was my first time doing any sort of AI, and I had to do it quick. I went for a quite simple version - a stack-based finite state machine together with A* pathfinding.
Audio and original music
At the time as a hobby I started to get into Ableton and making my own music, so I decided to test my skills in the real world. The song that I'm most proud of is the main theme that plays during the game. I took the original song from metal gear - Theme of Tara, and remade it so that it would sound more like "gnome music". I changed the instruments to be trumpets and tubas, and threw the overall rhythm of the song to be less rigid and serious.
Original main theme from Metal Gear (Theme of Tara)
Main theme from Beer Buddies
Other
Of course, as always when it comes to team projects, I also helped out in creating other parts of our game. I had a pretty big influence on the design of our game(including the core idea), and always gave my feedback to artists in our team.