Every video game is like a school, however only at a spy school are the kids actively engaged in combat situations. In the book Spy School by Stuart Gibbs, Ben Ripley, a gifted student at a regular school, was pulled out to study at a secret spy school for the government. However he will realize it's still just like normal school but with the added bonus of espionage and combat training. The school ended up making a mistake on the identities of the intended recruits. At the beginning of the book, Ben Ripley is awkward and nerdy but over time, he begins to gain confidence with his conditioning of social and physical stamina. Chip, the main antagonist in the book, has been at spy school for many years and hates Ben because Chip sees him as weak. The setting of the book is in a remote location where there is a military base styled school. However in this game, the only setting that is portrayed is the battlefield as the players have most likely been to a regular school but have not seen the battleground.
In this video game, you, the player, experience the same process of being put into unpredictable situations in which you must survive. My sister and I have played the game with my sister not knowing the controls even though the recruitment of the school would probably choose someone who knew the controls. However even after learning the controls my sister has never been accustomed to playing video games so she had a hard time learning just like Ben Ripely. Just like a school, this video game requires the player to try the same situation over and over again until they learn. Ben Ripley at the start was always the underdog, unfit, dork, and overall a nerd. However by sheer luck and determination sometimes he is able to climb to the spotlight.
After testing my game with my sister, I have realized I’ve made many mistakes in the process of development. I might go on a rant here but implementing online multiplayer was a real challenge because the engine I used from scratch is extraordinarily un user friendly for multiplayer. But after a couple tutorials and implementing my own encoding function everything now moves only at 200 ping or a 200 mill second delay. Another thing I was forced to do was to scale down the project. I was originally intending on making an RPG but now I have since realized that I procrastinated too late for that. At the start of March I threw away all of the campus and furniture I was working on to focus only on the battlefield. Fighting other players seems to be the fun part in every game so I just included that. Now I was saying earlier this was frustrating but actually it saved the entire project because there was no way I would get the game in on time this polished. I was also suffering from a problem with game developers known as "feature creep" which is the practice of continuous adding of features. I didn't need to give the player the ability to drop items but I did and that cost me a lot of time. I now realized focusing on what I want to accomplish first should be set before development. A rare but nice ah-hah moment was when I was starting to draw out the graphics that appear on the screen. At first I thought I wasn't good at digital art but now, I feel a lot more confident discovering this "hidden talent".