Uploaded December 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
This student-made game was created in Fall 2024 by students in Cohort 34, as part of SMU Guildhall's Team Game Production I curriculum.
Beaver Quest is about solving puzzles and building dams all to enact revenge upon an evil tree who destroyed all our friendly beavers’ homes. We chose this theme through a series of fun iterative storyboarding. It first started with what genre of game we wanted to create, as a team we bounced around adventure, platformer and puzzle, but eventually settled on a puzzle game.
Then we decided what our puzzles would revolve around, we thought of the board game Rush Hour with its idea of moving cars out of the way in specific orders to solve the puzzle, but this eventually morphed into moving cubes onto certain spots, which also eventually became the idea for our pressure plates. Lastly came our theme where we first thought of an evil tree as our main enemy or reason for the player progressing through the game. This naturally led to who would a tree fear most? We thought of the main character who was a lumberjack whose job is to literally cut down trees, but then we realized that the cute little furry animals called beavers also hilariously cut down endless amounts of trees just to dam up rivers for homes. A beaver is much cuter than a lumberjack thus we went with the main character playing as a beaver!
The total creation of Beaver Quest took the culmination of around 3-4 months of work. The team was given around 3 hours everyday of the work week to work on the various tasks that go into game production from level design, programming, art, and other production related tasks. Although, some overtime work was approved by our stakeholder which allowed us to squeeze in a few extra hours before certain milestones were due.
The experience of making Beaver Quest was invaluable to all our team members as game creation can be a wonderfully rewarding experience, but also comes with certain unforeseen problems that only become known once one as embarked on the creation process for themselves. For example, certain tasks during the making of our game took more hours than was initially planned for, such as our movement system. Task creation is something that can only be learned by simply doing and certainly something we did a lot of as a team. How to timebox and create efficient tasks are also skills we worked on as a team. Other skills like communication were improved. We learned that when creating a game there are many complex moving parts that introduce risk, this risk can be magnified if communication is not happening. Learning how, when and what to communicate was a fun and stressful process but made us all better at working within a team.
So, embark on the great Beaver Quest to defeat the evil tree once and for all and share in the journey that we created!
This student-made game was created in Fall 2024 by students in Cohort 34, as part of SMU Guildhall's Team Game Production I curriculum.
Beaver Quest is about solving puzzles and building dams all to enact revenge upon an evil tree who destroyed all our friendly beavers’ homes. We chose this theme through a series of fun iterative storyboarding. It first started with what genre of game we wanted to create, as a team we bounced around adventure, platformer and puzzle, but eventually settled on a puzzle game.
Then we decided what our puzzles would revolve around, we thought of the board game Rush Hour with its idea of moving cars out of the way in specific orders to solve the puzzle, but this eventually morphed into moving cubes onto certain spots, which also eventually became the idea for our pressure plates. Lastly came our theme where we first thought of an evil tree as our main enemy or reason for the player progressing through the game. This naturally led to who would a tree fear most? We thought of the main character who was a lumberjack whose job is to literally cut down trees, but then we realized that the cute little furry animals called beavers also hilariously cut down endless amounts of trees just to dam up rivers for homes. A beaver is much cuter than a lumberjack thus we went with the main character playing as a beaver!
The total creation of Beaver Quest took the culmination of around 3-4 months of work. The team was given around 3 hours everyday of the work week to work on the various tasks that go into game production from level design, programming, art, and other production related tasks. Although, some overtime work was approved by our stakeholder which allowed us to squeeze in a few extra hours before certain milestones were due.
The experience of making Beaver Quest was invaluable to all our team members as game creation can be a wonderfully rewarding experience, but also comes with certain unforeseen problems that only become known once one as embarked on the creation process for themselves. For example, certain tasks during the making of our game took more hours than was initially planned for, such as our movement system. Task creation is something that can only be learned by simply doing and certainly something we did a lot of as a team. How to timebox and create efficient tasks are also skills we worked on as a team. Other skills like communication were improved. We learned that when creating a game there are many complex moving parts that introduce risk, this risk can be magnified if communication is not happening. Learning how, when and what to communicate was a fun and stressful process but made us all better at working within a team.
So, embark on the great Beaver Quest to defeat the evil tree once and for all and share in the journey that we created!
