About

The Production

This is the second game made by the Mad Skills Programmers.  Considering that Dragon Kingdom was our worst game ever, we generally think of WASTE as being our first real game.  This project was started in the Summer semester of 2002, and was finished the following Fall semester.  Our goals for this game were to make an RTS called WASTE, and be able to play over the network.  Since most of the team was very familiar with RTS games, it was rather easy to begin coding right away.  This was very helpful since we had to make the first half of the game in a shortened semester.  At the end of the summer semester, WASTE was the most complete game in the class.  In the second semester of the game's development however, we ran into a few troubles.  One problem we had was a poor design for how single player and multiplayer would be discriminated in code.  This was aggravated by the fact that we were originally focused on multiplayer, then later told we needed single player working sooner, and then held up to get multiplayer working again.  All of that managed to make a good chunk of our code rather ugly.  Another failed move we tried to make was to convert all of our drawing to use Direct3D.  One problem with this was that nobody on the team really knew Direct3D well enough to get it working good in the necessary amount of time.  The second problem was that we were rendering way too much graphical data.  We thought 20 MB of compressed graphics wasn't really that much, but when we did some calculations, we found that really was over a gigabyte uncompressed.  So that didn't work out too well, and unfortunately we wasted a good amount of time on that.  All in all, we learned a lot from making WASTE, and the mistakes we made were not all in vain.

The Team

Adam Brennecke -- Producer
Adam's primary responsibility for this project was to make the map editor.   This turned out to be a lot more work than was originally thought, but he made it work.  Adam also made most of the music for the game.

Christian Crowser -- Designer
Christian joined the Mad Skills Programmers at the beginning of this project.   He was given the task of actually designing the details of this RTS called WASTE.  In retrospect, that wasn't the best way to design a game, but that was what Christian had to deal with, and he managed to do a good job.  Aside from the design, Christian programmed the workings of the units and made the AI.

Jeffrey Lindsey -- Technical Director
Jeff was responsible for the graphics, networking, and general code layout for WASTE.  He also created a lot of the art. The (only) tileset, most of the in-game interface, and most of the units and their animations were made by Jeff.  (Not to mention that nifty box cover to the left.)  Jeff was also the one who originally came up with the idea for the pathfinding algorithm we used in WASTE.

Clark Morse -- Sound Director and Product Manager
Clark was the one who implemented the pathfinding algorithm for WASTE.  This proved to have many tricky parts to it, but he got it to work almost all of the time.  Clark also assisted Adam in composing music, and Jeff in creating unit animations.

Justin Lalone -- Lead Tester
Justin developed everything having to do with user input, and the user interface.

Jose Luis Rosado, Jr. -- Art Director
Jose got pulled out by the U.S. Reserves during the summer semester, and lost his position as a Mad Skills Programmer.

Recommended System Requirements

Windows 2000
600 MHz Processor
256 MB RAM
32 MB, decent video card
Two button mouse with scroll wheel
75 MB hard drive space
DirectX 8.1

Extended Credits