This project, completed in April of 2000, was a children's game based on the feature
film released at that time. I served as programming lead on the project, which was
a cross platform PC/Mac title. The target audience was fairly young, and the game consisted
of five distinct sub-games. Of these, I was directly responsible for coding two: a strategic
board game, and an arcade style matching game. Being lead, I was also responsible for
program architecture and control flow, as well as the usual scheduling and documentation
tasks.
Most of the challenge during this project
arose from the cross platform issues (especially the Mac memory limitation). We were the
vanguard project for the new (and not quite complete) Human Code proprietary engine. Development
was done in C++ using the standard Microsoft development tools (VC++ and Source Safe) as
well as in house art tools. Code Warrior was used to compile the Mac version and Installer Maker
was employed to burn the hybrid CDs.
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"Collosal Fossile Face Off" was the board game; which played very much like "Stratego", with a
human player and a computer opponent. The graphics were sprite based and the AI fairly straight
forward. The dinosaurs would begin lined up at each end of the board, and players would take
turns moving the dinos until the opponent's nest (or egg) was found.
In "Lemur Love Match", the player had to match up like-colored flowers before the timer ran out.
The flower colors cycled quickly to make this more challenging, and penalty flowers (weeds) were
also thrown into the mix. This game had 30 levels to complete.
The Face Off game also had a sub screen for displaying up to 20 "dino fact" cards. Each time
a game was won, a new card would be unlocked. These cards had various data on them,
which could be read aloud via voice over. They could also be printed.
Though completely 2D, this project made heavy use of voice overs and movies. Getting all of the
asset to work smoothly on both PCs and Macs was fairly challenging. In the end, though, it all
came together on time (which is good since it HAD to hit the shelves when the movie came out).
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