Narwhal's story is a long and twisted one. After our First Playable milestone (Basically a vertical slice of what you want your finished game to be) with Blobby, we came to the hard realization that, no matter what we did, the code behind it was so twisted and bad there was no way we'd ever be able to fix it to a point where we could keep adding content and improving on the game. To make matters worse, what was there to improve? The game was already solid, and any extra features we could give to it wouldn't really improve the base game: they'd either make it more convoluted, less focused, or basically serve as padding all while taking way too much time to implement thanks to the terrible code base. So after much grieving we decided to make a new start - a new start named Narwhal.
...well, that wasn't it exactly. We actually bounced around about a dozen different names, from Lost Narwhal to Tropical Labyrinth to God knows what. In fact, it was only a couple of days before Gold (DigiPen's final ship date for the game) we settled on just plain old calling it "Narwhal". It was what our audience came to see after all: no DigiPen game prior had ever even featured one, though there was always talk about doing so. Because hey, unicorns/Jedi/whathaveyou of the sea and all that. I tell you though, I can't express in words how proud I am of how we came through that year. Not only did we start from scratch - we managed to make a completely new game in half the time it took other teams, and ours is still one of the better games of our year (in my completely unbiased opinion). I could go on for days about the troubles Narwhal has given us - especially when I was going through adding all the content - but that's a story to be told only on request. I wouldn't want to bore anyone.
In the end, I have mixed feelings about Narwhal. As games go, I think it's the least fun of any that I've made. At the same time, it easily taught me the most about being a good producer and team member, and for that I still have fond memories of working on it. We really cut it close with Narwhal, but we still pulled it off. And Hell, someone finally made a game about Narwhals in DigiPen. No one else can say that.
...well, that wasn't it exactly. We actually bounced around about a dozen different names, from Lost Narwhal to Tropical Labyrinth to God knows what. In fact, it was only a couple of days before Gold (DigiPen's final ship date for the game) we settled on just plain old calling it "Narwhal". It was what our audience came to see after all: no DigiPen game prior had ever even featured one, though there was always talk about doing so. Because hey, unicorns/Jedi/whathaveyou of the sea and all that. I tell you though, I can't express in words how proud I am of how we came through that year. Not only did we start from scratch - we managed to make a completely new game in half the time it took other teams, and ours is still one of the better games of our year (in my completely unbiased opinion). I could go on for days about the troubles Narwhal has given us - especially when I was going through adding all the content - but that's a story to be told only on request. I wouldn't want to bore anyone.
In the end, I have mixed feelings about Narwhal. As games go, I think it's the least fun of any that I've made. At the same time, it easily taught me the most about being a good producer and team member, and for that I still have fond memories of working on it. We really cut it close with Narwhal, but we still pulled it off. And Hell, someone finally made a game about Narwhals in DigiPen. No one else can say that.