Educational Feature: 'Student Postmortem: DigiPen's Psychosteamion'

In today's main Gamasutra educational feature, part of the expanded Gamasutra Education section of the site, DigiPen student Zach Aikman takes us through a detailed postmortem of student game Psychosteamion. In the introduction to his postmortem, which explains what went right and wrong during the development of the title, Zach notes: "Since the middle of our first year at DigiPen, we had been tossing around various ideas for a second year project. We all belong to that strange group of individuals who believe that the 16-bit era was the “Golden Age” of the video game industry. Consequently, we wanted to capture that timeless feeling of playing an old Super Nintendo game as best we could. The graphics, controls and gameplay were all designed with this concept in mind. In the end, we opted to create an action/adventure game, similar in style to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The trick for us was to keep our game as original as possible while still capturing all of the essential elements that made the Zelda games so much fun to play. In the end, the high concept for our game ended up looking something like this: A 2D, top-down action/adventure game set in a steampunk/magic hybrid world, with an emphasis on puzzle-solving and dungeon-crawling elements." You can now read the full Gamasutra education feature on the subject, including plenty more interesting feedback on the making of this student title (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).