In some ways, I almost wish Capstone/Senior Production wasn’t ending.

This final sprint is nothing but fixing minor bugs that we haven’t gotten around to, and doing final visual polish. We are totally feature complete at this point. It’s a weird place to be, this close to the end. This project has been my primary focus since the end of August, a total of eight months of my life. In the grand scheme of game production, that’s not very long. But in my college career, re[Mod] has taken more of my time than anything else–a total of 427 hours at the time of writing. That’s only about 3 months worth of full time work, but that’s plenty for a college student with other classes and 3 part-time jobs.

The really crazy part about the project ending is the idea that, a few weeks from now, no one (or next to no one) will ever play re[Mod] again. The team as a whole has put in 1,861 hours at the time of writing. That’s the equivalent to one person working on the game for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for almost a full year. We’ve put sweat and tears into making this game as fun as possible, engaging to a wide crowd, and (mostly) up to the standards of a modern FPS. It’s not AAA by any means, but our professor once described it as AA quality, and that’s significant for an indie shooter with a team of 8.

We rejected the idea of selling or launching the game in any real way after graduation because of the nightmare that would be involved in maintaining the project and ensuring its stability and longevity. We might place it on itch.io, but the odds of it getting any traction there are next to nil. It’s hard not to be a little sad at the idea of all our builds gathering dust on a hard drive somewhere, never seeing the light of day again. I think the concept that we’ve come up with is strong and maybe some of us will be able to work on something like it again in the future. But despite all of our work and dedication, after the next few weeks, re[Mod] will be just another abandoned student project.

And that kinda sucks, huh?