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 […]