In the spring of 2004 Chad Austin suggested making a simple game and trying to work in a team. I agreed not only because I had never worked in a team before, but this was also a chance to see if my passion was really game development. Also I wanted to create something polished that would fit nicely into Lithuania's game demo scene. And finally we decided to make this game participate at the Students's Showcase of Independent Games Festival (IGF). First we had a multiplayer game idea but later on I came up with a puzzle game.

We started slowly with a team consisting of two people: me & Chad. Later on, Chad got busy with graduation and work. Consequently, I became the one and only developer in charge of project management, coding, 2d & 3d art. Later on, Sean Oyler, a very talented musician from Canada, accepted my offer and joined Grass Mania. He composed 4 outstanding soundtracks together with a pack of sfx. So we ended up with a team of 3 people: me as the programmer/artist, Sean as the sound/music engineer and Chad as the main advicer and supporter.

"Grass Mania: Need For Grass" is a funny 3D puzzle game. The main character is a cute doggy with a lawnmower which the player has control of. The objective of the game is to cut a certain grassfield in time and without running out of fuel. Each level has unique grassfields in terms of how many and how obstacles such as trees, bushes, stones, etc. are placed. The time and fuel given to mow a grassfield also varies in different levels. Grass Gods exist in the game. From time to time they throw random power-ups and items from the sky which help to complete the levels.

The game was written from scratch in C++. No third party engines were used - only libraries. Those include: OpenGL (open graphics library), SDL (simple direct layer), corona (image read/write library), audiere (sound library), cal3D (skeletal based 3d character animation library), glText (TrueType font support in openGL), libexpat (XML parser).

For the art part, all textures( except one) and models were made by me. Nothing was taken or copied from other games.

• Correct blending.
• Particles ( grass, smoke, dust, power-up fx).
• Skydome and sun effect.
• Static and dynamic blended models.
• Skeletal character & model support.
• Basic pathfinding, 3D picking.
• Eye catching UI.
• Basic lighting, multitexturing, fog, etc.
• Music and sounds.

• 127 source files
• ~17 000 lines of code
• 6 months of development
• 3 team members

• Current Demo ( 20.9 MB )

• Official Grass Mania website