My Sophomore Game

I was reminded recently by talking to one of my instructors that I really need to update this page.  My goal here to show off stuff that employers can look at, so I'll dig back into history and pull out Muzika!  Muzika was my sophomore game.  Muzika was an arcade-style rhythm game.  Me and my teammates played Rock Band together quite often and wanted to replicate the fun we had.  Our team wasn't all fun and games though, we did lose and gain several team members throughout production.

We originally started working on the game over the Summer.  We had wanted to get a head start over everybody else, and for that reason we created our team probably before anybody else, well into the Spring of 2008.  We worked over the summer hammering out multiple concepts until we arrived on a game similar to Geometry Wars.

At the end of the Summer we were ready to start working on the game, but then the turmoil started.  One of our members was accepted into the Masters program at DigiPen, so we had to acquire a new teammate.  We decided that it would be best to change our game concept because it was still hadn't started coding, and we believed that if everybody had input into the idea they would be more motivated.  This was fine until our new teammate decided to change his degree.  I am glad however that he did pursue his real goals.

Finally we gained Tony Feist to save the day!  With inspiration from Tony, we came up with our new game concept that was a cross between Guitar Hero and Audio Surf.  My responsibilities on the new game team were to program the graphics engine.  This included programming the rendering, particles, UI, and text.  This was really my introduction to DirectX and shaders.  I would also like to take a moment to point out that the game was coded from scratch in C++.

We presented our Alpha for Music Off, later changed to Muzika, in December of 2008.  Here are some screen shots:

We started our second semester and learned that we had lost Tony, our inspiration.  Due to unfortunate circumstances, he wasn't able to continue game class.  We then had to refactor our game idea to meet our abilities.  The team was down, but we finally decided on a game that just tried to mimic Guitar Hero and Rock Band.  While we knew it wouldn't be possible to match these games, we still knew that our refactored goal would be much easier to obtain.  Later we acquired our artist, Jennifer Gilliland, who really helped to give our game its amazing look and feel.  We pushed on until the end of the second semester playtesting and polishing our game.

I feel like we learned a lot from the team troubles.  Even with any conflicts, I am quite proud of what we achieved.

Final Game Credits:
Keith Leung: Producer, Game Architect, Input, Tester, and Note Char Designer
Joanna Leung: Designer, Game Logic, Sound, and Tools
Jennifer Gilliland: Artist
Michael Alling: Art Director, Graphics

Here are the results:
Enjoy!

You can download the game here:
Muzika Download Page