Late 2009, I was approached by two researchers/teachers at the Utrecht University if I wanted to make a game which would interest future students in a specific area of Computer Science. That area was the gate assignment problem, which essentially tries to find the best planning on airports under a set of constraints. This seemed a good opportunity to make some money with my interest in making games. I didn’t have much time to work on the game back then, but wanted me to do it anyway, even if it was finished later.
The concept
The concept behind the game was fixed, and that was that the player has to create its own schedule for assigning planes to gates. The obvious way to go was to make a puzzle game, in which an optimal schedule has to be made. It was suggested that the game would be made in Java, using an Applet so it was accessible through a web page. That was a logical suggestion since Java was the main language taught at the Utrecht University back then (it is now C#). But creating games in Java is not very fast, and time was an important factor in this project because of the very limited budget. So I convinced them that Flash was a better choice.
The art
My specialty is definitely not art. If I want to produce art with an acceptable quality, that takes me a long time. So I asked Maarten Wiedenhof to create the art for this game. I had learned about his work through DGDARC, where he made some great pixel-art posters for activities. He did a great job! The difference between my own quickly made art and Maarten’s art is HUGE:
The placeholder art
Maarten's art
Flash is heaven and hell
Flash seemed great because you can make something simple very quickly in Flash, but after working with it for a while I kept encountering weird quirks. For example lines behave really weird: they don’t have a width. That’s true for mathematical lines, but not for these visible lines! Other weird behavior is that some objects got collected by the garbage collector while flash should still maintain an internal reference to them. These kind of weird design choices really annoyed me as a developer. I know that it doesn’t have to be that way!
But in the end, the advantage of making games quickly outweigh the annoyances.
The game
The game is all in Dutch. Everything is explained in-game.
I hope you enjoyed the game. Let me know if you beat the final bonus level (nr. 20) with a perfect score! (And mention the perfect score, to convince me.) I deliberately made that level extremely hard to complete perfectly. Some algorithmics master students complained that the levels were too easy…
My judgement
I think the game is very slick, and is the best it could be with this concept. But I’m not very happy with the core concept. The concept makes it just another fun game, in stead of something special.
I know there are some features missing, such as a pause-button, a fast-forward button and a reset button (which would keep your last schedule). But I already passed the budget for this game, so I could not implement it anymore.
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