The Doll Maker is a video game that I made during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school at Marist's pre-college program for game design. This was a two-week course where I was able to express my interests in game design while completing college-level work and earning three college credits all at the same time. During the first week of the course, we were introduced to Construct 3, which is a browser-based game engine that uses a click-to-add system for all of its events. After making several smaller games throughout the first week, we were placed in groups to create a large-scale game for the final project. My group was comprised of three students, including myself, and I was given the role of Lead Programmer by my teammates. In this role, I was responsible for creating the entire logic for the game and making the game come to life by creating the events for the game.

The Doll Maker is a horror survival game, similar to that of the Zombies mode in Call of Duty games, where the player has to survive against waves of attacking dolls with limited resources as the dolls become stronger and tougher to beat as you survive for a longer period of time. The idea for the game was one of creative collaboration as we combined the idea of wanting to make a zombie survival game with a story inspired by "The Doll Maker" Minecraft map.

Development of the game took place throughout the second week of the program. As a group, we began working on our parts in our own project files. While my teammates were beginning to design the map and the overall style of the game, I was initially working on the core features for the game in a virtual sandbox. During this period of development, I was able to individually create some of these basic mechanics and then slowly put them together as I created a working system for the game. This phase was by far my favorite part of development as I was able to use trial and error to create the logic for the game with minimal consequences as I was just working in a blank space.

As each of our respective parts began to grow, my team combined all of our work into one project file about halfway through the week. This was important as some of my parts started to rely on the art and map designs, and vice versa. Unfortunately, a lot of our work did not function well together when initially combining the projects. We were required to present the work that we had so far to our classmates, and we discovered a multitude of issues just while demoing the game for five minutes. Luckily, a lot of these issues were relatively easy fixes, like widening the hallways to better fit the player, and we were able to quickly get a functioning, but unpolished, version of the game.

The next phase of development was adding the finishing touches to the game. As a team, we worked together to finish the map design and the menu layout. I also added some bonus features to the game, such as the round system and special weapons. We even had time to add an Easter egg to the game, which is a hidden puzzle within the map to unlock the end of the story and a secret encounter with the Doll Maker, himself.

The final stage of development was testing. We playtested the game a ton and even had the student teaching assistants play the game to get an outside opinion on the functionality of the game. The more times we played the game during the testing phase, the more bugs we found that I ended up fixing within the code of the game.

Overall, the week of development for The Doll Maker was one of the craziest weeks of my life. To this day, I cannot think of another time in my life where I worked on a project as ambitious as The Doll Maker in a time frame as short as the one that we had. The requirements that the team defined for the project were extremely lofty, and I was forced to stay in the computer lab for several additional hours every night just to continue checking off these requirements as the deadline drew nearer. Furthermore, Construct 3 is not the most intuitive or well-functioning game engine in the world, and a lot of time had to be spent on making the game work within the restrictive confines of the game engine. In the end, The Doll Maker was completed on time with polish that far exceeded our expectations for the game. I will forever be proud of my teammates and myself for the above and beyond efforts that we all put into the game to ensure its completion.

Below are the instructions for how to play The Doll Maker:

If you want to see the code and play the game through the Construct 3 engine, begin by downloading the repository. Next, go to https://editor.construct.net. Select Open --> Open from file and then select The Doll Maker.c3p file you downloaded from this repository. Once the game loads in the engine, you can view the code by selecting any of the event sheets. You can play the development version of the game by clicking the play button on the top of the editor.

If you want to play a production version of the game, please visit the following website: http://summergameinstitute.com. Select 2018 at the top of the page, and then click on The Doll Maker. You may also go directly to the game by visiting the following link: http://summergameinstitute.com/2018/DollMaker/.