Last Haeven

Last Haeven (yes Haeven and not Heaven :p) is my first relatively big game, which was made in assignment of my Avans university. The game was a big success, my team and I got the highest grades for Last Haeven. The game was created in the period February '06 - June '06.

I build this game with only 3 students/friends:
- Michiel Synhaeve
- Bram Smulders
- Roy van der Vorst

At the Avans university, all the multi media specialized students need to do the game project. You get 5 months to create a game: create a game concept and fully work it out to a playable game. The only requirements were:
- the game needs to be build in JAVA,
- the game needs to have different levels,
- the game needs to have some kind of character development,
- keep the game 2d (5 months is not enough to develop a 3d game).


Level background

The teachers make up the teams, each team will make their own game. At that time there were 6 teams, so 6 games to be developed. From the first day of the game project, my team was different. Each team consisted of 6 or more members. On paper my team also had 6 members, but on the first day of the project, 2 members couldn't do the game project. So my team was left with only 4 members. Knowing that, the teachers were planning to split the team and put each member on a other team. It was our own decision to keep the team and to do the entire project with only 4 men.

During the project each team had to do presentations showing their progress and demo's of the game. With only 4 men, my team always had the best progress and results. Already from the 2nd month of the project, everyone (teachers and students) expected that my team would develop the best game.

With only 4 men we chose an old game concept to work with, the top down shooter (like space invaders). Our final concept was based on a few games, Sonic wings (Aero fighters), Warning forever and Ikaruga. Especially the game play of Ikaruga had a big influence in Last Haeven. In Ikaruga an enemy can be black or white and fire black or white projectiles. The players ship can change from black to white and vise versa. By doing so the player can absorb the projectiles of the same color and fill a meter to perform a special. The player could only be destroyed by projectiles of the opposite color. We used this concept for Last Haeven.


Sonic wings


Warning forever


Ikaruga

The final concept was a top down scrolling shooter with a modified Ikuragua game play and 8 levels with enemies and a cool (big) bosses. A friend and I (50% of the team) are big anime fans so we build in some anime like bosses: Meteor (gundam seed), Mobius Zero (gundam seed), a space ship from the anime Vandread and Macross from Macross (Robotech in the US) . Also the players ship was based on a spaceship from the anime Crest of the stars.
One member (Roy) of the team was good in 3D Max, so we gave him some pics of the anime ships and he made a 3D model, black and white version of them. We used the 3D models in Last Haeven, making the game more 3D like, even tho the game play is fully 2D.



Meteor from Gundam Seed


Mobius Zero from gundam Seed


Ship from Vandread


Macross


The players ship based on a spaceship from the anime Crest of the stars

I even used different scenes from anime series to create cut scenes for the game. The plan was to do an anime cut scene for every boss, but I only had time to create 2.


Intro movie of Last Haeven, the visuals are from the anime Crest of the stars and the song...... I forgot from which anime OST.


Mobius zero boss intro, visuals from gundam seed and the song is from the anime movie Appleseed OST (boom boom satellites - Dive for you), but since we only had 2 movies this movie was put at the end of the game. Like an reward to the player for finishing the game.


With a team of only 4 men, I was involved with almost any aspect of the game from designing, sound choice, cut scenes to coding and testing. I programmed the enemies and most of the bosses, their patterns of moving and shooting, the different types of projectiles, the collision detection, a combo counter etc.
We all have spend a lot of time in this game. For me, even tho it was an assignment for the uni, I loved working on this project. I didn't mind working a lot at home and missing some hours of sleep for this project. The game project was the nicest project that I had to do for the uni.

At the end of the game project, the game had:
- 2 movies ( one intro and 1 boss movie),
- 5 levels with enemies and bosses, background music and scrolling map,
- a combo/kills counter with voices from quake 3 and unreal tournament,
- a level editor where we could drag and drop enemies on the map and generate the level with an .xml file.
- character / spaceship development at the end of each level, for the kills the player gained a rank and the ships weapons would be upgraded.

The game was almost complete except for the movies. The original concept had 8 levels, but we only did 5, so that we could work on other things for the game.

Of all the games that were made by the teams, our game was the most complete and had the best and nicest game play of them all. We got a 9 (out of 10) for the entire game project and the best of all, the experience of creating a game out of nothing.

There is only one problem with the game. The game is build in JAVA, not the most ideal language to write a game in -_-. To playback movies and music we used the JMF, JAVA Media Framework. To play the game,the pc needs the JRE, JAVA Runtime Environment and the JMF installed and configured. On the pcs, which we used to develop the game, the game runs fine, but on some pcs the movie and background music wouldn't playback. Probably something with the JMF. Last Haeven without it's background music, just isn't the experience that we want to give to the players.

Looking back at it now, we really did an excellent job. With only 4 men we managed to build the best and most complete game. It's something I'm really proud of.

I won't put this game online, because of the problem I mentioned earlier (maybe someday when the problem is solved). To give an impression of the game, I made a game play movie of it (playing it on my own pc where the problem doesn't occur).


Last Haeven game play movie, the video capturing tool that I used made the framerate of the game slower, so the game runs smoother normally ^_^