Comment on blog – nr 6 – Shifatul Kabir Siam

Dear fellow student,
Don´t be so hard on yourself. You did it! You and your team built a game during the course and presented it on the Final playtesting session.
I understand from reading your blog post that you have had a tough ride to get there. You describe difficulties that have occurred both for you as a person and for the team. Or, sometimes not like a team at all… Reading your blog, I am impressed by the journey you have […]

Postmortem – blog 6

We made it! During a 10-weeks course, group Kraken built a shoot ‘em up game that works! The game has a tutorial scene, two different scenes of gameplay and a final scene when the player meets the boss in a final epic fight. We have a power up that finally works (!) and two different enemies with attacks and movement patterns that makes them very different from each other. Our boss enemy has three different attacks. I am proud of […]

Comment on blog 5 – Axel

Hi Axel!
First thing I must comment: As a student with the same minor as you (design) I am so happy to see that you are using user stories in this active, productive way! I honestly haven’t seen too much of that during this course, but I myself have found user stories to be a powerful tool for communicating design to the team. Thank you!
Now to the subject of this blog post – playtesting. In your blog post, you describe both […]

Playtesting – Blog 5

From the beginning of this course, I felt that this part of the development process – playtesting – was a little bit frightening. I thought that the game needed to be almost finished before it was any use in letting someone test it and that it felt scary to show others our product.
Reading the literature about game design and playtesting, and by watching lectures in the subject, I have started to understand that it is never too early to playtest […]

Comment on blog 4 – Ana Laura

Hi Ana Laura
Until now, I have only commented on blog posts written by someone with the same minor as myself (design that is), so this feels refreshing. First of all – the squirrel is very cute and watching all the pictures in a row is like reading a little story.
I know a bit about the basics about animations due to earlier experience, but I have not done much of it myself. This blog surely is a reminder of how much […]

Adapt to circumstances and grow as a team. Blog post 4

Working in sprint 6 we are now close to Beta. All core movement, features and challenges area supposed to be implemented (at least close to finalized) and between Beta and the Final version of the game there will be time only for tuning and polishing the game.  
Our goal for this sprint is the final challenge, the boss fight if you wish. The sprint planning now works smooth for group Kraken. It works like this:
I show the user story for […]

Comment blog 3 – Teodor

Hi Teodor!
Thank you for an interesting post.
As a game designer to be, I especially enjoyed reading your reasoning about user stories and how you have changed your way of thinking about them. You write in a way that makes it easy to follow both what you are writing about and why.
In your post, you describe that you, in the beginning, could not really see the point of using user stories for the sprint planning since you had the concept document […]

Comment blog 2 – Maximilian

Hi Maximilian!
Thanks for letting me read an interesting post.
It feels very clear to me as a reader, that this post is about the design of the boss in your game, the bear that is attacking the beehive. You describe how it was designed from the start, and that the solutions you decided on from the beginning did not work out when the team started to build this bear for the game.
After that, you describe changes that you and the team […]

To Scrum or not to Scrum – Blog post 3: 20180222

Our way into Scrum
In my group (as in other groups as well I believe) it became obvious, that only the ones with design as a minor had knowledge about the Scrum framework when this course started. Not that we were experts in any way, but we had at least read about it in the previous course. The project managers started to learn about it now in their minor, but since both courses started at the same time, at least my […]

Powering up the Power up – Blog post 2: 20180215

So – this week is Alpha week – and my post will describe my reasoning concerning the detailed design of the power up.
The game that we are creating in my team is named “Aetherial” in the original concept document and the main objective for you as a player is to hunt and kill the big whale. Like a Moby Dick story in the sky you could say.
Early in this course, on the very first design meeting I called for, we […]

Blog post 1 – 20180208 – Using stories to guide the design process

The subject for this post: The process of breaking down a user story about a whale. The aim of this process was to create tasks for the team members to work on during sprint 3.
So – what did I do this week? As the lead designer, I led the design discussion in the sprint 3 planning meeting, Monday 20180205, with this user story working as a starting point:
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
As the whale
 I want to

make my first appearance slowly from the bottom of […]

Blog posts for game design courses

This is the place for my blog posts in game design courses