Waterworks was a student project developed during the fall semester of 2008. It’s a 4-player party action/simulation game with the simple goal of collecting the most water from the sky. The water is a particle system that can pool together, acting like big globs of liquid. Each player has a static position at the bottom of one quarter of the screen, and they place tiles anywhere on the grid above to funnel water to their “bucket”. Tiles would dynamically degrade over time (yikes, first the water comes in globs, and then it eats away at tiles? I wouldn’t drink that), and special items allowed for more varied gameplay, such as bombs that would destroy tiles.

This was my first game project with such a large team. There were about 10 core team members that saw the project all the way through (around 18 at the start), part of a game seminar class jointly offered by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art (my alma mater).

I did a few concept sketches for the gameplay, and thereafter mainly focused on tile design and template creation for the other artists. I also helped make a 3D teaser trailer for the game, where I made a 3D character model, rigged it and another character, and animated them sprinting at each other. When I find it I’ll post that here too.

Unfortunately, our plans to continue development outside of school and get it published on the Xbox Live Arcade never came to fruition.

A year later, I took the class again and we made ChromaWaves.