Celerity

Post-mortem

Celerity is born in a really anarchic and random way. We were two 4th year student exchange students in South Korea, and we had to make a game in some months. We had some ideas, and we made them evolve with the game itself, while learning Unreal Engine 4.
Was this a good idea? As students, of course. Trying designs while learning technics, this was heaven for learning. As for the game? Of course not! Nothing could have been more unspecific than our design goal, which was completely non-existant. In fact, we even had most of our game design classes after doing most of the game.

Celerity started as a simple idea "hey, let’s make a game like Sonic Adventure where we can fly, a bit like the flying levels of the first (good) Spyro games!" "Yeah cool, and make it with limits on the fly, and multiple paths aaaaand a lot of other things we won’t have time to do!" "Yeah, sure!".

Our first research was how could we make a good flying for our main character. The idea came quick, as we had played thatgamecompany’s Flower not long ago: use the SIXAXIS! This looked brilliant, and was one of our major problems. We asked countless time a devkit to be able to use it with Unreal Engine 4 to our professor, who said that he could have it, and we never had it. In one year! We worked on this game without being able to implement our first design idea… Of course it couldn’t end well.

And just to be clear: we had… not designers. Yeah, we’re from a computer science school, so this is the kind of things we have to deal with. But with our idea of Celerity, we needed designers. We did what we could, but the result is not really awesome because of this. But I think it’s still looking really not that bad!

So. First semester, we were originally three on the project, but only two of us (Théo Marchal and newin) worked on it. We started making the character model, animations, and making it IN SPACE! Why? Because space is fun and cool. We like space. So we put some platforms in a 4K space skybox, and it was cool looking. We just wanted to make something fun and cool looking. And one of the worst ideas we had that was "hey let’s make a huuuuuuge 3D model of a colony when we have to present the game in 3 days". And for things like good level design or multi-path… This was impossible with our university workload and one phantasmagoric member. So we ended up with what we called version 0.1, video below. Ugh, it’s horrible to see this now!

So this was between september and december 2014, with an emphasis on december 2014. Most of the work was done in december.

New semester starts off in february 2015, through june 2015. The team adds up François Gherabi who will be a great asset for thinking about features and doing level design, and Christophe Sauviat, who will make the soundtrack and sound effects. Honestly, we’ve done a lot of work that will never show up in the game. We’ve written a story all together, with a context, plot, lot of gameplay features. Like, drifts, homing, forward dash… We put up a Trello and a Slack, and it proved to be really good to communicate and work.

It helped us to be focused on what matters, and with 3 people, we did up a pretty good job, taking into account this was not the main project of our year — it was one among three others. We did playtests, we put up a lot of efforts on details to make it look pro. Of course, it doesn’t really look pro, but for a 3-people student project, we are kind of proud of the result (and without artists!).

We were thinking of making it better and better, with like 5 city levels, online leaderboards… But no. This project took us a lot of time, helped us getting experience in playtest, UE4, learning process, working with constraints, game design, decisions, organisation… It was a good experience overall, but we want to make other games, with design goal, game design and ideas set up since the beginning. The problem was having a lot of ideas, not a lot of resources, and trying to make too much. We would have needed twice as persons to make something like we wanted it.

So what we have now is a good tutorial level aimed also towards non-players (and 95% of people who played it have been able to finish), a scoring system, a camera that was a real mind torture, a city that almost looks acceptable, and a lot of experience gained. PsychoScientists will live on, and we hope that you will still enjoy the demo we present to you, and that you’ll follow our next games!

Download Celerity for Windows, Mac and Linux