Gaea

The Game

Gaea is a city builder in a high fantasy setting.

The player has to construct a city meeting the diverse needs of humans, elves and dwarves. To do this, he has to gather and refine resources, and create an infrastructure capable of distributing the goods to the people.

The Creation Process

The team consisted of David Mehlen (Programmer), Alica Klinger (Art Lead),  Lukas Meyer (Producer), Robin Sucur (Sound), Andreas Huber, Marküs Kühner, Christian Filser and Maria Youssif (artists). I was team lead and in charge of creative direction.

Gaea was an interesting project. We were about a year into our studies. Up to this point, the usual group size for group projects was two to four people. In this project we were a whopping eight. This meant we had to seriously manage ourselves for the very first time.

The main focus of the exercise wasn't the project itself, it was about executing the approach correctly by managing a team and a bigger project, setting up sensible creative, art and technical directions and learning how to pitch in front of critical audiences. With all that baggage, 10 weeks were over in an instant.

As team lead, my job was basically to make sure we'd pass and deal with everything non-game related. After some brainstorming with the group I formulated a quick battle plan on how we'd tackle the coming weeks. This allowed us to start producing immediately. Chaos found us, however, as the university kept constantly changing it's demands and deadlines.

It's quite sad, but there was never a real game coming out of this. All things considered, we passed and I still like what we came up with. Even with my professor urging me to bury that thing six feet under, I present what we have here with pride because this is the project where my team and I first met and worked together. After weathering that storm, we knew we could handle stress and create great things together.