Curbside Combat

Summary

Computer Game Science majors at UCI must complete a Senior Capstone Game Course where students split into teams and spend 20 weeks developing a game with periodic assistance from industry mentors. My team decided to build a fighting game. Curbside Combat is designed to be simple enough that fighting game novices can enjoy button mashing, but also provide avenues to access the strategic depth that is prominent in popular fighting games; imagine a game somewhere between Fantasy Strike and Street Fighter V in terms of complexity. 

What I Did

Prior to this project, I didn't consider myself a very technical person and had very little confidence in my own programming skills. However with my three teammates implementing Art, UI, and Sound respectively, it fell to me to do the bulk of the gameplay programming. From a design perspective served as a kind of "sanity check" for the project's designer and sought out justification for design decisions to make sure we were meeting our stated design goal.

What I Learned

First of all, I rediscovered joy in programming that years of coursework had drained out of me. Explaining my code to our mentors and getting feedback along the lines of: "Yeah, that makes sense" went a long way in building my confidence. Secondly, I learned a lot about fighting games by necessity. Implementing most of the lower level features like collision and player states involved design discussions about how player characters should interact. Luckily one of our team members had the expertise necessary to make these discussions productive. Lastly I learned that there is more effort involved in animating a fighting game character than I could have imagined (Thanks Tina!)

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