Postmortem Ethereal Team Ithaqua UPGRADE

Being the project manager for my first real game in a group of 6 people has been a learning experience for all of us. Keeping the group together and working with each other has been my task. We have had good times where we had successes with the game as well as more troubling ones where we have had a little conflict within the group.
The game as a whole came together very good in the end despite that one of […]

Post mortem: Team Bugbear Umibozu

My previous posts have been detailing the design and production process of a game me and a couple of fellow students have been producing for a course in game design. Now the project is over and it is time to reflect on the experience.
In the end I think most of me group are feeling a bit disappointed with the end result. We ended up having to cut a bunch of features due to time pressure, whilst also having to hastily […]

How (not) to Handle Playtesting

During the development process we had a couple of playtesting sessions where me and my team, together with all of the other teams, gathered to show and play each others games. The reason we did this was to give us an outsider’s perspective on how the games felt to play. Things that are obvious to you when you are building the game might be completely alien to someone who isn’t involved in the creation process. This is something we struggled […]

Educating social workers on problem gaming

Patrick Prax was invited by Region Gotland to educate our local social workers and medical providers about problematic gaming, youth and “addiction”.

(The video is currently being re-uploaded. Sorry for the technical snafus)
The talk was in Swedish but Patrick recommends the book “What’s the Problem in Problem Gaming”. It is an anthology which provides a number of perspectives on the issue, such as players’ life conditions and lifestyle choices, problem gaming from a family perspective, the voices […]

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Hi Edin,
I’m glad to hear that you’ve had such a great team and I really think you guys should be proud of what you produced. I had the opportunity to try it out, and quite enjoyed it 😀
When it comes to your post though I do have some gripes with it. First off I feel like it might have been nice if you included some type of description of what the project you are concluding actually is.

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Hi Emelie,
Great article, nicely structured 🙂 Hearing about your previous experience while working without scrum versus what it’s like now when implementing it was quite interesting. But what really brought the post together was the fact that you also made sure to give a brief description of the basic concept of scrum so that anyone whom might stumble past your blog would still be able to understand what it’s all about.

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Hey Jad,
First off, nice post 🙂 It’s always fun to see how people solve different problems they face while making their games. I can’t help but pretty much agree with noirjesus, the post was well written and informative. However, when it comes to the clearness I did have one thing that I couldn’t really wrap my head around. In the section where you talk about using the Vector3 values for determining the spawn positions you mention that the Y value […]

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Hey Jan,
I couldn’t agree more with what you are saying here. We’ve definitely had similar problems in our group. I was even finishing up our build during the start of a playtest at one point (not something I would recommend 😛 ). So what you bring up is absolutely something I think a lot of people just starting off with game design could learn a bunch from.
The only part I can really critique with your post is perhaps your use […]

Prof. Bartle back on the island!

We’re continuing the expansion of our research wing at the Department of Game Design, and we are happy to announce that Prof. Richard Bartle is joining our team on Gotland as a guest professor!
We welcome professor Richard Bartle – Honorary Professor at University of Essex and Guest Researcher at the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University!
Professor Bartle co-wrote the first virtual world (MUD, in 1978), making him a pioneer within the massively multiplayer online game industry, […]

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Heya Fredrik,
Well done on the post 😉 I really liked the use of gifs to easily give an overview of the features you’re talking about. Otherwise I think it would have been hard to visualize the avoidance behavior (or should I say beehavior :P). The game is also looking great btw, I really like the fluidity in the bees’ movement. But when it comes to the movement I do have one question.

Post mortem

So, The Umibozu, the 2D Edo Japan inspired mystery game done and the first game production at an end, and a lot has been learned.

Team Logo
The game Umibozu became a mystery adventure game, where the player searches for clues about an event through fog, fending of creatures of the sea, and avoiding the pelirious terrain using their foglight – until finally finding enough clues to figure out where the Umibozu hides. The game doesn´t have a final boss battle […]

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Feedback on: https://hampusbgame.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/umibozu-post-mortem/
Hey Hampus!
Nice read, you seem to get a grip on both the production as a whole, the teams and your individual work. Was wondering what the dominant strategy actually was but writing that might spoil the game. It’s nice that you don’t just see the flaws in the design, but actually talk about how you could have mitigated them using prototyping and playtesting. It’s well written and brings up what seems like most of the game […]