Snowburbian League
Giovanny Ospina
Gio is a game developer, level designer, programmer, and a UI/UX designer. After he graduated from the Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) Game Development program and earned his Associates of Applied Sciences Degree (A.A.S.), he knew working within the video game industry was something he strived to achieve. Gio decided to transfer into TCNJ where he not only continued his specialization in game design, but also challenged his creativity through different forms of media as he completed his B.A. in Interactive Multimedia. While his passion does lives with video games, he is also an avid sports fan and a Disney Pixar fanatic.
Play the game on itch.io!
What is Snowburbian League?
Snowburbian League is a five-a-side football/soccer game where you control a team of Snowmen and play against the Gingerbread AI opponent.
Inspired by my love of sports, I wanted to try and create my own arcade game that’s set within a snowy suburban neighborhood and inside a compact field with smaller goals. While this was not my initial proposed idea for Senior Thesis , I made the tough decision over Spring Break to completely brush that project aside. Instead, I shifted gears and focused on creating a super cozy winter sports game. While it took a major adjustment with rapid development in coding loads of gameplay mechanics, modeling and animating my winter characters, and proper level design, I genuinely felt that it was the right call to make after a rough few months. I was able to motivate myself in order to deliver a final project.
Development Process
While the game mechanics in hand are very simple to understand, the process of creating this game was quite a doozy, mainly because of the implementation of AI players. In order to incorporate AI, I began making a Finite State Machine, which took tons of research and understanding of how to properly piece it together. A Finite State Machine, or FSM, is the process of giving the entity a finite set of states that it’ll continuously transition in and out of. Using the FSM gave me the possibility to handle all transitions between multiple states and helps the AI players complete which ever action or event is called for that state. By identifying the multiple states throughout a basic soccer game such as Attacking, Defending, and Goalkeeping with respective sub-states such as Ball Control, Player Chasing, and Tackling, delivering a fluid game loop was the end goal. By initializing the FSM with an initial state, all it had left to do was wait till the AI changes states and broadcasts the event indicating that they have finished their action. Once all that good stuff has come to an end, the FSM will go back and change the state, just to do it all over again!
While I spent the majority of my time in Unity, I allocated some time in Maya to focus primarily on designing two main characters that would make up the two different teams. My snowman character went through a few iterations in the beginning as I was unsure whether they should have legs, or if it should have the rounded layers. I went with the latter as I felt I needed to stick with the true nature of a traditional snowman that we all love and know.
For my gingerbread character, I was able to get the best of both worlds. Since the shape of a gingerbread man clearly resembles the human figure, I had the opportunity to easily create a basic character rig and test out a few animations like goalkeeper diving, jogging, and even tackling.