Cult Town is a turn-based, grid-based strategy game where each player is a leader of cult and is trying to get the most followers in 11 rounds. Each player has a total of 9 abilities at their disposal, starting with the ability to place posters and unlocking more abilities as the game progresses, eventually leading to abilities like murder and summoning god. The townies will randomly move at the end of each turn and whenever they’re in range of an ability their influence points will increase with the respective cult. Once they’re influence for one cult reaches 7, they’ll convert and become a follower which you can then control and use to influence other townies. The game was made in 3 weeks with a team of 4 people including a dedicated producer, designer, artist and programmer.
Even though everyone in the group didn’t know each other by the start of the project I like how we all got along really quickly and even had a pizza party after the game was finished and presented. We generally were pretty good about keeping each other up-to-date on what we were doing. The programming for the game went pretty smoothly sprint 2 (week 2) but we hit a lot of roadblocks in sprint 3 (week 3), mainly with getting abilities working properly. In retrospect, we should’ve focused on getting abilities to work in sprint 2 since things like movement tend to be easier to code in. However, considering I had really never made a grid-based game before, (unless you count a very quick mock-up of candy crush for Game Tech), I’m pretty proud of how much I was able to get implemented. One of my proudest achievements though was hearing that we were the first group from Game Production I to have a senior like out cult game. He said that it actually felt like they were playing an actual cult leader.
Even though this was my first time working in an actual group for a game, I’m overall pretty happy with the outcome but I did still learn a couple of things. I especially learned that whenever you have a new group of people you don’t know it’s always good to see if anyone has any other skills outside of their dedicated role. Just because an artist is technically the artist it doesn’t mean they don’t know how to program, their skill could be helpful for when the programmer gets stuck maybe on a bug or isn’t sure how to implement something. For instance, Benji our designer is apparently very good at programming as well. I know most designers know basic programming but I didn’t realize that Benji was that one designer who everyone questions why they’re not a programmer. We only started working together 3 days before the project was due. What we should’ve done was work together from the gecko, we were both fairly confident that if we had done that we could’ve had a fully working game considering how close we were. There were only a few bugs that we needed to work out and the game would’ve worked.
