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King of the Castle is a game I made in my second year of university. The goal of the module was simply to develop a game within a small team following industry-standard practice.
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This was my first major project when working within a team, and I’d elected to be the game designer on our team of 5, which ended up making me the team leader by proxy. I’d never managed a team before, so this definitely added an extra layer of challenge to this project.
Gameplay Video
We used Trello, a project organisation website, to create workboards and track our progress. As you can see by the burndown chart, we were fairly sporadic in our work schedule in the end, and we had to do the occasional extended period of work, but that was mainly due to obligations with other modules. However, having that chunk of unfinished work represented in time estimates really helped to show myself and the team keep on top of things and deliver a good product by the end.
As well as project lead, I was also the team’s only Game Designer, so the task of designing both the game and its levels was left down to me. I wanted to create an asymmetrical multiplayer game right from the start because I knew that would make the game have much more replay value, and everyone would want to try out the different characters. The game was a Bomber-Man style Capture-the-Flag game where the winner was determined by who could hold onto the crown for a set amount of time without getting attacked.
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Other contributions I made to the project was some minor programming in the form of the character select screen and some 3D modelling work in the form of the crown object.
I took inspiration from Super Mario Bros for the NES when designing my levels. Mario’s levels were famously drawn on graph paper, so I drew up some grids of my own and designed my levels on that.
I designed my levels in a corridor-like fashion and avoided large open areas as our grid-based movement system just wouldn’t feel satisfying in an open plane. The corridor design also created a lot of tension among players, as you’d have to base a lot of your movement choices based on where each other character was on the map and added another layer of strategy to the game.
There would always be multiple routes of escape for the player, and rarely would a player feel like they were stuck or that they couldn’t have prevented their death.
There’s a lot looking back on this project that I would do differently now, but for a first-time group project, I’m fairly pleased with it. I had a fantastic team; I really can’t stress enough how great we all gelled together on this project, and I would go on to work with Nadine Bucknor on Big Bad Friend a year later. After presenting our games at the end of the year, we were one of two teams taken aside by the lecturer to be advised to post our games on Steam Greenlight, as well as getting nominated for Sheffield Hallam’s end of year game awards.
Our game successfully made it past Greenlight, but we were all too busy with work placements and university projects to go back to working on the game, and by the time third year was up, we’d all matured as developers and were capable of much better things by then, and Big Bad Friend was right around the corner for me and Nadine. The game is in a fully functional state, so if you’ve got three friends and some Xbox controllers, you can feel free to download the game below!
