Group dynamics and high performing teams

With the arcade project just around the corner, people are starting to form their own groups ahead of it. It is clear that the people who have ambitions and the motivation to create something great are seeking each other out. Many of the other  project managers have already managed to form teams of highly skilled individuals.
At first it was also my intention to try to create such a group. However, I ended up not doing so. I am still one […]

Dev Blog #4 -The Unseen Work of a Producer

Hello again!
This is the last week before the beta deadline for the first year students’ upcoming Shoot ’em Up games, so I thought this was a good time to talk about the unseen work of the production. By unseen work I mean things that don’t produce tangible results the same way art and code does.
As a producer of a small team I need to wear many hats, but the majority of the work I do can’t be seen or measured, […]

Game Design journal 4

Mikael Ferroukhi                                                                                                                            date: 01/03/18
5SD064
During this week I have been working on a Level layout design. Up to now, me and my team had been working on our game Umibozu without any real structure concerning how the game actually take place. We knew the enemies, the character and its power ups, the obstacles, the boss and etc.. but we never explicitly said how all of this would be organized inside of the game.
At first the idea for our game was to […]

Presenting the Alpha

Okay, making a game is one thing, but presenting it to a potential publisher (or just fellow students!), making a great first impression, showing all the cool stuff, gently manoeuvring around what has not been polished yet and keeping it all very succinct is very different. And it usually is very difficult to accomplish. That being said, I enjoyed making the Alpha Presentation of Fear is in me very much despite the fact it wasn’t nearly as significant as trying […]

Blog post 2 Comment on Edin Karakurt

The reader got a clear picture of what the author has been working. The writer also explains why it was essential and the teams thought process when the power-up was developed and made it a reality. The reader also got a sense what the writer encountered when he created the power-up, how the power-up became a suicide by making all of the enemies targeting the player. The reader would personally like a bit more on how that problem was solved […]

Creating sounds

During the last week, I have been creating sounds for the game. It has been an interesting challenge for me, since I have never been editing sounds before. Moa Bruus (Lead Sound and Artist), has been very busy with numerous artifacts conserning art. Therefore, I have been helping out by editing audio files.

To know what kind of audio we needed to implement in the game, the group had a discussion about what sounds we wanted to add. During this discussion, […]

Lightning laser breath attack thingy

This week I’ve primarily been working on the boss of our game, Aetherial. The boss of the game is a huge, flying whale, that you as a player is supposed to hunt down. The boss appears multiple times during the game, at first you only see its back as it soars through the clouds, but in the final scene you actually face this leviathan head-on. During this fight the boss will use several attacks against the player, one of which […]

Level design

Before I talk about the actual level design of our game, there are some thing that you may need to know in order to fully get my reasoning.
In our game the player’s lives is represented by bees lined up on the left side of the screen, while the player navigates the “main bee” freely around the screen. The non-controllable bees have the ability to shoot an enemy that gets close enough, but they can also get hit by projectiles and […]

Fourth post: Movement

In my first post I talked about the perspective of our game, Umibōzu, and how we had to change some of our design decisions because of it. One of the mechanics affected by these decisions was the movement system. In this post, I wish to talk a little bit about the movement in our game.
Making a movement system is both very easy and very difficult. It is fairly trivial to make a player avatar move when you press a button, but […]

Dev Blog 4, Level Wrapping

This week I will be writing about how our design goals and ways to achieve those goals impacted the way our levels are implemented.
The camera system in our game is top-down, and the camera controls the pace at which the player progresses. The camera moves upwards on the screen at a set pace. Side to side however, the player is free to move as they wish. The goal with this design is to give a feeling of exploration and freedom, […]

1st of March

Our team member from the Game Design minor finished constructing the overall layout of our level earlier this week. It consisted of large horizontal wall sections, placed in such a way as to create different paths for the player to travel. He then handed it over to me so that I could build the actual level using all of our art assets. It quickly became apparent during the process of placing assets and decorating the level that it’s very beneficial […]

Learning about Sound Design and Feedback

Besides my role as programmer I am also the lead sound designer at our game project aetherial. I felt comfortable picking that role since I did have some experience in music (I played cello for about 10 years) and because I already had some very minor experience in editing and creating sounds digitally. However learning an entire software is no small task and I am still learning new stuff every day about FL Studio, which is the software I chose […]