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Shipping Out

George Mason University

George Mason University

Fairfax, Virginia

3 0

Shipping Out is a 3D third-person friendship adventure game that finds the player character exploring and adventuring in the coastal town of McGuire. Players will create their parents and then take control of their custom avatar on the first day at a new place full of mysteries and adventures! ...learn more

Project status: Published/In Market

Game Development

Groups
2020 Intel University Games Showcase

Intel Technologies
Other

Code Samples [1]Links [4]

Overview / Usage

Shipping Out is a 3D third-person friendship adventure game that finds the player character exploring and adventuring in the coastal town of McGuire. Players will create their parents and then take control of their custom avatar on the first day at a brand new school. Beyond the schoolyard though, mysterious things are happening around town and it’s up to the player and some quirky new friends to figure it out. What has been stealing things from around town? Where do the missing objects go? Is it ghosts? Aliens? The government? It’s up to you to uncover the mystery and blow this case wide open.

Created By:

Additional Help From:

  • Dean Eskew: Animator
  • Calvin Carlsen: Sound Designer

Methodology / Approach

Shipping Out was created over the course of 9 months (2 semesters) of development as a Senior Capstone project by a student team of Computer Game Design majors at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.

One of the primary development goals of Shipping Out was creating a suite of tools that allowed the writers on the team to quickly implement cinematic scripted sequences, and unique gameplay set pieces. This toolset culminated in the “Chit Chat” system, which was used to build all of Shipping Out’s 2-4-hour story in just a couple of months. Chit Chat was a standalone program written using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) that provided a user friendly interface for creating dialogue, scripted sequences, and even gameplay for use in Unity.

With a self-reliant content pipeline that required no direct programmer involvement, the writers and artists could quickly build and iterate on crafting the characters and the world of Shipping Out. This tool driven approach to development also laid a solid foundation for project management. Sprints were completely focused on creating new content, and stand-ups could be spent focusing more on story and gameplay rather then dancing around technical issues. Writers could request a new feature during a standup while working on the next batch of content until the feature was implemented into the Chit Chat system. Always allowed development to move forwards, never stalling.

Technologies Used

  • Unity 3D Game Engine
  • Visual Studio
  • Autodesk 3ds Max
  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
  • Fmod

Repository

https://dpandaheart.itch.io/shippingout

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