Project Nautilus | Spencer Bohl

Project Nautilus was the first real game I worked on. It is also the first game I can say is officially published to Steam! Working with my fellow students as part of Isthmus Studios was a wonderful experience that I learned a lot from.

I was taken onto the team at a later date than the original members but I still put forth my best effort to make this project a success. Our team included just over twenty people and we were given the total time of approximately nine months come up with the idea for this game and develop it.

During the development of this game I was part of the AI and Gameplay sections of programming. While working on the AI I primarily was part of the ideas team working with the lead AI Programmer and a Designer to make sure the Design team and the Programming team were on the same page. I did also put some work on back end MOB spawners that were used during testing but eventually changed so that the dead fish did not disappear.

As part of the Gameplay team my involvement was varied in many ways. Some weeks it was working on bug fixes, other weeks tweaking mechanics, sometimes even working on a new mechanic. Using the base drone movement system we already had in place I added additional movement options to it, primarily the "sprint" mechanic.

Another addition I worked on was the beacon system we implemented. The beacons were tricky to work with at first since we needed them to be persistent through death and unloading the area, yet we still needed the option for them to be destroyed by the enemies. Eventually we worked it out to being a list of Game Objects that could only be changed by player or enemy interaction. Players can place or destroy beacons adding them to or removing them from the list while the enemy fish can only destroy them also resulting in them being removed from the list.

There was also some backend development programming I helped with. Using our level partitioning system I developed a debugging tool that would allow us to jump to different sections of the game with proper loading and unloading of the areas. This tool was useful during QA testing to allow our testers to try out later sections of the game without having to play through the entire game just to get to it.

Overall the development of the game proceeded smoothly, although we did have some misunderstandings between the different disciplines. Working with them was an experience that allowed me to work on many different aspects of development and I believe every member was able to synergize well compensating for each others strengths and weaknesses. If this has interested you in any form I recommend checking out the game on Steam at Project Nautilus.