About Life And Death

Über Leben und Sterben

Like “Omertà”, “About Life And Death” was a semester project for my university which didn’t follow any projects offered by the professors. Luckily, Professor Bernd Hanisch allowed us (i.e. “SONEN HALS”, which still only consisted of Jana and me) to make another computergame prototype in 2008.

But because this time we wanted to make a game, not just a prototype, we reduced our requirements: one small indoor level, two characters at the same time, more realistic graphics, less gameplay. At the beginning, we thought of a beat’em’up, but after testing some rather old games on the PSX (and failing at the controls) we decided to change that concept to what now is a two-player-deathmatch-multiplayer-game.

Again, Jana mainly did the graphical stuff. Although I made the level mesh, its true beauty comes from Janas textures, lightmaps and botanical prefabs. She also created two characters, the Huntress and the Prey, from concept to model. I did the same with the second, “strong” form of the Prey (see below). I also programmed the prototype by using OGRE as 3D-engine, Bullet for physics/collision and FMOD Ex for music. Of course, RakNet was used for the networking things. This time, I used Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition as IDE, which produced some problems of its own …

Other programs we utilised: 3D Studio Max 8 and 9, Photoshop, Audacity, Z-Brush, UVLayout.

The gameplay is easy: try to get rid of your opponent. “About Life and Death” uses the classic controls like any ego-shooter, so not much to say here. It gets interesting when you play the part of the Prey, as you will have to be more defensive: instead of shooting on sight, you’ll have to create traps to confuse the Huntress and use your morphing abilities to make yourself stronger.