Portfolio Entry: Mind Sway

About

Mind Sway is a prototype Facebook game developed by me for xDelia, my employer May 2010 - February 2011.


Purpose
Simply put, the goal of this game is to help the person that plays it become more financially responsible. To facilitate this goal Mind Sway is developed as a platform for testing and improving financial capability in people. The desire is that the game will contain an avatar which is semi-autonomous and can be controlled by the player, but which can end up making horrible decisions due to high impulsiveness, and other factors. The player can then opt to participate in minigames aimed at the factors the avatar is poor at and at the same time improve this factor in themselves as well, by implementing scientifically tested tasks which has the desired results.


Technology

• Implemented in Unity3d
• Utilizes the Behave library for behavior trees used by all characters in the game.
• A* Pathfinding library for all pathing in the game.
• MySQL for the storing of all user data.
• Facebook API for identifying users and getting any pertinent information (such as finding out which friends the player has whom are playing the game as well)

Media

Cooking for UDK

I attempted to cook an alpha version of my UDK Game, Zombie Road, this weekend but soon ran into problems with missing scripts and packages. So here is a small check list of things that needs to be done to fix it, beyond adding things to the .ini files.

1. Compile game in frontend.
2. Cook game, don't forget adding your maps to the maplist.
3. Go to your UDKGame\Scripts folder and copy your game's .u file, in my case ZombieRoad.u, to UDKGame\CookedPC
4. Copy all used packages from UDKGame\Content to UDKGame\CookedPC which would be things like maps, weapons, vehicles etc.
5. Package game in Frontend.
6. Done

Up to step 2 is easy to find. Step 3 you can find on the UDK forums if you do the correct searches. Step 4 is trickier.
Hopefully this saves someone else the trouble of finding this out the hard way.