Project Background:

The Hallowed Grounds prototype was created to showcase the 2009 Little Rock ITT-Tech Digital Entertainment and Game Design class's abilities when it comes to designing and creating a game prototype. We had a little under 40 weeks in which to brainstorm, design, implement, and test our game prototype. There were originally seven of us on each team but during the design process we lost our primary programmer due to external circumstances. This altered the functions of each team member as I became the only programmer. During the design process we also narrowed the scope of the project from a small game to a demo and eventually a gameplay prototype which better satisfied the requirements of the project.

Prototype Features:

Third Person View – Camera follows behind the player allowing for intuitive movement.

Minimalistic Heads Up Display

Free Roaming Gameplay

Game Concept:

Hallowed Grounds is a 3rd person acrade style shooter in which the player takes control of Twiggy, an off duty police detective who has been drawn into the small town of Hallowed Grounds. It is during her investigations that she starts to uncover the truth about the town and how her own past is somehow linked into the history of the town.

Gameplay:

The player controls the main character from a 3rd person view where they are able to interact with the game world by picking up objects and triggering switches or actions based on the environment. The player will not be constrained to one path but will be able to travel anywhere within each level, choosing from various paths or actions to complete their goals.

Game Engine:

The engine chosen is the Unreal Tournament 3 engine. In hind sight, we should have opted to use the more documented UT2004 engine, but these are the things which one learns by trial and error. The prototype programming is extended from the functional UTGame class and then adapted to suit the needs of our particular project. This is true for a large majority of the ingame items and game logic. The reason for extending the base UT3 code was that it would save a lot of time by not having to re-invent the wheel. This approach allowed for our new object classes to utilize functions which are native to previous classes in the game structure.