When starting any digital project the first question is always one of practicality:  “What software does exactly what I need it to?”  The answer, unfortunately, is always none.  Approaching this challenge then becomes a series of arguments about which features are not integral to the experience of the project. Sea Ventures decided that the primary software we had to decide on was a game engine.  The decision dictates how the game looks, and what skills our programming team would need.  Oddly enough, this decision was perhaps the easiest.  Our team only had experience with one game engine, Unity, and therefore that was our decision.  Then, we had to decide upon other software for creating assets, cut scenes, and more. Unity was certainly a good choice, even discounting Muhammed’s previous experience with the engine.  The software has numerous tools that make creating the type of game we were aiming for much easier, such as access to the asset store which is useful to new developers because it provides access to high quality work, such as UI’s, special effects, and even crafted models.  These things can all be incredibly useful for new developers like our team. In addition, there is a large community of kind and wonderful people on YouTube and on forums online, and the platform itself is probably one of the easier game engines to learn.

Furthermore, as the game developed, it fell on the rest of our team to decide the types of software we would use to create things like cutscenes and character designs. It was quickly established that the game would be 2D and take place primarily on a scroll, which meant learning Photoshop, since it is the standard software for image editing. Luckily, Ben had some prior experience and quickly learned the extra skills necessary to produce simple assets needed. It was also decided that Adobe After Effects was the best software for creating simple 2D cutscenes because it was simple to operate and easily learned due to many online tutorials.

Our last major decision was about how to distribute this game.  It was decided to use web-GL. By not requiring any downloads, and being accessible simply by going to a website, this option of distribution seemed most fitting, and the easiest way for our game to reach the maximum amount of people.