Gotland Game Conference 2015

Once a year, in Nevada, the Burning Man festival takes place. There’s a phrase that goes with it. When asked “How was the Burn?” the answer comes, “It was better next year.”
I bring this up because, every year, we have a similar ritual. At the party, we turn to each other and say: “This was a good year.” To which the comeback is, “How the hell are we going to top this?”. Sometimes there’s a shudder that goes […]

Converted to wordpress!

So the site has been converted to WordPress! What does this mean? It looks pretty much the same right? Well, apart from the blog finally being integrated with the main site, yes, however the backend is completely fresh.
At first I was reluctant to convert to WordPress. I’m quite familiar with WordPress and its functionality but in committing to this architecture you generally have to sacrifice some flexibility due to the nature of the themes. After some searching and fiddling however […]

BGP (Scrap Pirates) – Week 7 & 8

The two final weeks of the project was pretty hectic, so I will write a post about both weeks now instead.
Week 7 marked the Beta, which went well and we got a lot of positive feedback from the playtesters. The game demo felt well-balanced so we decided to dedicate the two final weeks to final fixes and tweaking, and implement what hadn’t been implemented yet such as the opening cutscene and main menu.
Since we felt satisfied with the level design […]

Week 8

So, this was the last week of production and a lot of things have happened. But to begin with, here is the second track of the game, the Rumble Eight.
This track is a lot smaller than the other, ”main track”. While the large one takes around 45 seconds (best time) – 1 minute and 30 seconds (average beginner time) per lap, this one lands at around 15 seconds (best time) – 30 seconds (average beginner time).
The track overlaps […]

Week 7

So this week has been all about balancing the level with booster placements further and in general finishing the level up.
This is how the level is going to look in the build for GGC. Supporting pillars have been added to explain how the track is kept afloat. In the area under the loop in the back, there is a ring that surrounds the tracks, this ring represents the start and goal of the track.
We have also added in […]

BGP – Checkpoint – Print-U

For this post we’ll take a look at the checkpoint of the game. Idea of a 3D printer, “printing” the character as it resapwns. The overall design of the checkpoint would be two plates, one for each player, where they could respawn, and a terminal in the middle indicating the function of the object as well as if it had been activated by the players. First of all when creating the checkpoint was creating the sprites for the checkpoint. All […]

Scrap Pirates: The last week of production before GGC

Gotland Game Conference 2015 marked the deadline of our production time in this course and we have now reached that point. As the last week of a production can be rather chaotic and present sudden, urgent needs in a project, I have been working part of my time with sound effects for the game as we noticed that we needed more of it. In terms of graphics, I finished working on the space parallaxing background as well as started the […]

Big Game Project; Final Week

Everything started out nicely until two days before the exhibition. All was in order and we started to build the lights a last time and going for the final build. But as we started doing that, our server crashed end the only working recovery point was three days old..
We wanted to get to the root of the problem, as no one knew what the reason for the crash was. We did not have the time to solve that problem so […]

BGP Week 8: End Game

We are finally at the end of the last week and we are pretty much done. We could have fleshed out the level with some more variation among the props, but it was not really necessary. It had been nice if we had time to rework the level layout, since we did not really get the visual progression we were after. Still looks appealing though.
We did get the boss into the game, even though we considered scrapping him for a […]

Tamarrion, post 8 (final week)

Apologies for being late with this post as I forgot about it in the midst of all the preparing and taking care of exhibiting at GGC. This is my 8th and final brief post on our Big Game development period of Tamarrion.

The last week of the project was more of the same from the week before. I continued cleaning our motion capture animation, and out of about 45 animations total, 18 animations for our boss and 15 animations for our […]

RAW DATA

Scrap Pirates: In the middle of GGC

So, we are in the middle of GGC, Gotland Game Conference. Well, maybe not in the middle, more like the two thirds through, only one more day out of three. We are showing of Scrap Pirates and a lot of people seem to like it. Tomorrow is the last day, which means that the deadline for voting and the following award ceremony will be held. I would be really happy if we were to win some award for Scrap Pirates […]