CLOE & Finch; A True Test
CLOE & Finch: a project that started strong but crashed hard. In the final stretch of my time at Full Sail, I was faced with a big "final test," so to speak. We were given three months to design and develop a fully functional game prototype, completely of our own creation. At first, I was ecstatic about this; It was exactly what I had been waiting for. A chance to really show everything I had learned and stretch my creative brain-muscles. However, when the hammer actually met the iron, things took a sharp turn that I never could have prepared myself for. In the first two weeks, we were all given the chance to create our own prototype, with no real restrictions. At the end of those weeks, every one of our prototypes would face the chopping block, and all of my peers and instructors would vote on the top five projects to move forward. I hit the ground running. I knew right away that I needed to play on my strengths and waste no time. I knocked out the earliest version of the GDD in three days (Final version -->) and immediately got into the engine. By the end of the first week, I had the basic character and camera set up, and by the end of week two, I had a prototype that I was immensely proud of. (Build -->)
To The Chopping Block
My game was heavily inspired by one of my favorite series; Ratchet & Clank. I built the core systems for a third-person action-adventure and made sure everything was designed with future expansion in mind. When it came time for the vote, there were a few hiccups on day one, but once every prototype was judged, the results came in: CLOE & Finch was one of the five projects selected. I was ecstatic.
Team assignments happened immediately, but my excitement barely settled before I hit my first roadblock: one teammate reached out right away to let me know they were dropping the class. I created a Discord server, sent invites and emails, and waited. The first night passed with no activity, but later that evening, someone finally joined. The next morning, our third teammate arrived. Our fourth never showed up again. Still, the three of us pushed forward.
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Our next task gave us the rest of the month (about a week and a half) to each design a mechanic and build a simple intro level. My mechanic was a melee system, another teammate worked on a grapple, and our third never contributed and ultimately failed the class entirely. Suddenly, the project meant for five became a duo.
The next month, I began building my mechanic in-engine. I had two weeks to implement the light/heavy melee system. By the end of week one, the heavy melee was mostly done, but my partner had gone completely silent. I reached out through every channel I had, kept working, and finished the GDD over the weekend. Monday came with no response, so I moved on to the light melee and finished it in about a day and a half. Coincidentally, that’s when my partner resurfaced. He completed his grapple the next day, though it failed to work during the demo due to persistent collision issues.
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Next, we were tasked with creating a mechanic-focused level, again in two weeks. I returned to the grind. I originally planned for more thematic variety, but cut it down to just the subway tunnel due to time constraints. Then, by Tuesday of the first week, my partner disappeared again. After several failed attempts to contact him, I reached out to my instructor. They advised me to try resolving things myself first, so I wrote a polite, professional message explaining my frustration and the imbalance in workload.
As the end of month two approached with still no reply, I finished and submitted my level and updated my instructor. That weekend, my partner finally responded: they were dropping the class. They apologized, explained their absence, and wished me luck on the final stretch.
Alone
Honestly, there wasn't much tangible progress made in terms of the "gameplay" from this point forward. We were meant to spend the last month expanding, polishing, and adding assets, and most of my time was spent rewriting and improving the enemy AI. Being by myself meant a massive chunk of planned content had to be cut, and I decided to just focus on the thing that the player was currently engaged with the most. Smaller but essential things, like the main menu, pause menu, and win/loss conditions, were all added here as well. Being completely transparent, my morale had bottomed out, I was tired, and frankly, I was drowning in technical debt. The last month was a rough and ragged run to the finish, but I did it. I had much higher hopes for CLOE & Finch than where it ended up, but for better or worse, I saw what I had through to the end. Below is the full post-mortem video for CLOE & Finch if you're interested in hearing me ramble on about this some more. (Apologies for the mic quality)