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Crystal Call

SMU Guildhall

SMU Guildhall

Dallas, Texas

24 5

Crystal Call is a fast paced, first-person speedrunner game developed and published by students at SMU Guildhall. Armed with a magical gauntlet, run, dash, blast and slide your way through challenging environments, master each level, find secrets, and compete for the top spot on Steam leaderboards. ...learn more

Project status: Published/In Market

Game Development

Intel Technologies
Intel Integrated Graphics, Intel CPU, Intel vTune

Links [8]

Overview / Usage

Crystal Call is a fast paced first-person parkour speedrunner taking place within fractured ruins floating inside mysterious caves. Armed with a magical gauntlet, run, dash, blast and slide your way through challenging environments, master each level, find secrets, and compete for the top spot on the leaderboards.

Features:

  • Fluid fast paced movement mechanics
  • 16 challenging levels
  • 36 achievements
  • Collectibles and shortcuts to find
  • Online leaderboards

Link: view the Crystal Call trailer on YouTube

Link: listen to director's commentary on YouTube

Published in January, 2021, Crystal Call is available for free on Steam. The game was developed by a team of 10 graduate students at SMU Guildhall's over the course of 22 weeks during the height of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The game represents about 3,000 hours of combined work from the team as a whole.

This project was beneficial to team members in that it allowed a real-world experience of developing a PC game for public release. Individuals served in roles that provided opportunity to lead, accept responsibility, collaborate, and learn new skills and abilities. Team members worked together to overcome challenges and find solutions while following best practices for both product and process.

Through this project, the team built a complex and satisfying player movement system, developed camera effects and environment interaction, and followed strong interdisciplinary pipelines and communication in order to find and deliver on the needs of the product.

Link: Crystal Call on Steam

Team Members (in alphabetical order):

Team Contacts:

SMU Guildhall Contact:

  • Steve Stringer, Deputy Director of the GameLab at SMU Guildhall - sstringer@smu.edu

Methodology / Approach

Challenge Mode, Accepted

As mentioned above, Crystal Call, was developed during the height of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The Crystal team was one of five Cohort 29 Capstone teams at SMU Guildhall working under challenging conditions. The teams conducted all pre-production in a virtual team environment for the first 8 weeks, and in a hybrid environment for the final 14 weeks, setting a new standard for hyper-rapid and Agile development that bested many AAA studios who struggled to get to full productivity during the pandemic.

Remarkably, all five C29 Capstone games shipped on time and were published on Steam. Even more remarkably, this followed the successful development and publication of their "Middle TGP" game called HaberDashers, which involved the entire cohort on one team. This course proceeded normally until March when, like every other school in the world, SMU went entirely virtual with just a week's notice to keep students and faculty safe. This forced a period of intense iteration and improvement during a time when the team was still learning how to communicate effectively on a large team, let alone how to do it virtually. Ultimately, they hit their stride quickly and managed not only to finish the course but bring the game to a quality level so high that we ended up publishing it on Steam. This was the first "Middle TGP" game to ever be published at SMU Guildhall.

The students took those best practices and even-better-ifs and put them to immediate use over the summer and fall courses. Summer was entirely virtual, still. The cohort developed 16 game ideas and green-lit five for prototyping and, ultimately, production. Due to anticipated social distancing requirements, we had to form more teams than normal to keep room capacities to a safe minimum. This added a whole new layer of challenge and execution to the production in that resources had to be spread very thin across all teams. Some teams had only two artists (Crystal had three), and other teams, Crystal included, had only two level designers.

Embracing the Constraint

The Crystal team embraced these constraints by developing an art style and a gameplay mechanic that made heavy use of modular assets that could be laid out and experimented with rapidly by only a handful of designers and artists without sacrificing the user experience. The design team ultimately created dozens of gameplay concepts by developing sequences called "Action Blocks". These allowed the team to "find the fun" rapidly by experimenting and testing sequences in a matter of hours to find what worked and, importantly, what didn't work for players. These Action Blocks could then be reconfigured and reused with minor changes and advancements on gameplay. It's hard to look at Crystal Call and believe it was made by so few people. This is a testament to the team's adaptability and raw talent.

Making Modality Irrelevant

Because some team members were fully virtual for the entire production, and SMU Guildhall maintained strict protocols with a bias toward staying home and staying safe if anyone on the team was symptomatic, the team had to get creative on how to facilitate development and testing.

One best practice we discovered was to take advantage of our many large-screen TVs and Intel NUCs. Coupled with special 360-degree cameras, conference-room-grade microphones, and high-fidelity web-cams, any teammate had a visual telepresence in the room, and anyone in the team could have a discussion with any remote teammate as if they were there together. This seamless integration not only made modality irrelevant, but, importantly, it kept remote students connected and engaged with their classmates. This didn't waive a magic wand over the stress and anxiety experience by everyone in the world during this pandemic, but it did make things easier for everyone and ended up being a lifeline for some in addition to a practical tool that will surely become standard practice post-pandemic.

With teammates and testers spread all over the country, the team looked for ways to virtualize their development without having to provision source control or lock down development environments. This is where the Steam SDK came in. Through a special arrangement with Valve, we were able to set up our teams virtually and distribute and test even though it wasn't a guarantee that we would publish the games through the platform. Steam deployment allowed the team to always have a playable version of the game to any teammate regardless of their location and also meant that could conduct user testing and research safely wherever the testers happened to be in the world. This ended up being a massive production advantage for the team as they were able to tap into literally hundreds of external testers thanks to a collaborative effort with SMU's undergrad eSports and GameDev clubs as well as SMU Guildhall's extensive alumni network. As a result, Crystal Call, along the other 2020-21 Capstone games, has had more eyeballs on it and has been enjoyed by more gamers than ever before.

Technologies Used

We used Unreal Engine 4 and a standard set of game development tools such as Adobe CC, 3DS Max, Maya, Substance Designer, Mudbox, ZBrush, and a wide range of audio authoring and runtime tools. Intel technologies included a variety of hardware CPUs for QA, compatibility testing, and production support kindly provided by Intel's Academic Program.

We made sure the game runs well on a wide range of Intel CPUs and Integrated Graphics in addition to discrete graphics cards. Primary development was conducted on Alienware M17 R4s featuring Intel i7 CPUs and augmented by a wide range of desktop systems, most of which were based on Intel hardware.

Hybridized production environment was facilitated in part by Intel NUCs attached to Zoom room systems which allowed remote team members to be integrated into the in-person dev studio seamlessly via telepresence.

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