Umibozu: a post mortem

Context
For a course, I worked a few weeks on a simple shoot them up game prototype in which you played a sailor lost in a haunted and misty sea, trying to navigate the dangerous reefs and avoid the attacks of the creature dwelling under the water.
We had to design the protoptype from a concept document that outlined the core mechanics of the game and its general structure. We allowed ourselves several changes from the original concept document. We change the […]

Comments

https://lovliegamedesign.wordpress.com/2018/02/07/spawning-errors/
Hello Fredrik, your friendly neighborhood Fredrik here.
So if I got this correctly, you have one prefab for each spawnable, and some of theses prefabs are in turn collections of other prefabs, parented to a ghost object? Makes sense and is pretty neat, though there is an improvement for the interface. First though, your explanation that you made a ”separate script to create formations based on the position relative to the center of the formation” is unclear. If the […]

Post Mortem

And we’re done! Well technically we we’re done several months ago, but it’s nice to revisit this project at its end. I’m overall happy with my contribution to Aetherial as a coder. As a game designer however I have some reservations.
The code works, there are no major bugs and there is a clear and working way from the start to the end. The game is full of devices and artifacts I am quite proud of, such as the updated transition […]

Playtesting

At both playtests we put up two computers playing the game, each accompanied by an extra computer with a google survey on it and an observer from the group taking notes on what and how the player was doing. Anna(game design) had written a quite extensive observation sheet listing all the things to look out for in the player. Somehow though we all just started writing down our thoughts, observations and informal interviews with players on the back of the […]

Playtesting: a fresh pair of eyes

Context
Unfortunately, our group did not benefit too much from play test. We were late on development for the first one(but did have a bare bone prototype to show), and a large bug prevented us from showing anything worthwhile during the second one. But, we did have some people try it during the beta once the game was stable.
Motion sickness
In our initial prototype, the player was always pointing up on the screen, and rotation would result in the camera rotating to […]

Postmortem

This project has been fun, but hard! We managed to make a functioning “shoot ‘em up” game. It is not the best game ever, and probably not the best version of Umibozu, but I am proud of what we have done. The art does not look that bad at all and it is indeed playable.
The whole process of choosing a design document, doing the pre-production, actually producing the game and to present the finished product has been a hell of […]

Playtesting

This blogpost is about the playtesting and how it affected our development. We had three playtesting sessions during this course. The playtests were very useful, and it was so good that we had the opportunity to test other games and to have our game tested. We got some really good feedback from our fellow students, and it was nice to see what the other teams were doing and how they solved some of their problems. It was also really interesting […]

this is about me

this is about me.
 
i was raised
in a pyramid of power,
in a circle of hatred and violence.
driven by ego,
fuelled by fear.
 
i was raised
homophobic, transphobic, sexist,
racist, carnist, elitist, capitalist,
etc.

all these absolutisms
governed the development of my brain.
formed my cognitive and moral foundation,
my thought patterns,
my language.
 
all these absolutisms,
in their own unique ways,
eventually led to loneliness.
 
but i realized,
i am not alone.
this circle of hatred and violence,
surrounds many
from an early, malleable age.
 
it’s really hard to break out of it,
and really easy to stay stuck.
as it inherently […]