blog comment Michael Degirmen

Here is a third comment, as i can’t find any blog posts from my fellow designer in your team.
Now, I’m not sure what i could add here that hasn’t been said already. Your post is very well written and fleshed out, a fitting summary of you and your teams struggles during the course of the project.
There is a lot to take away and learn from in your post, understanding how you and your team dealt with what could be considered […]

blog comment tomas savela

Gathering relevant feedback is tough for sure, especially with how unpredictable the testers can be. I think you put good focus on this complemented by your tips on how to improve the quality of the feedback. It is a shame that your post has bad sentence structure (some sentences are way to long) coupled with a few spelling errors, as it made the post confusing to read at some points. Also the pictures of spreadsheets are impossible to make out […]

Blog comment hampus serrestam

Alright let me start of by saying that this was a pretty good read, it is very clear that this is about making a tutorial. And a decent explanation of how (although i would like some more details personally, and some descriptions for the pictures). Why is also very clear with the explanation of how tester feedback prompted the making of the tutorial. Is the post valuable overall? sure! since tutorials tend to be a part of most games (I […]

Blog comment maya siden

Alright this was a pretty good post, you make it clear on what the post is about (boss design). The explanation on how you planned and carried out your design process was great. And lastly you give a clear case for why the design of the boss is so important with a challenge for the player in mind and all that. So overall it’s a great and interesting read. However, I can’t help but wonder if you might have missed […]

Blog comment Tim Wergeni Johansson

Is it clear what is done? Yes, you have clearly conveyed that you had a play-testing session where your gathered feedback. Is it clear how? To a lesser degree yes, the circumstances regarding how the play-testing was carried out is explained. Is it clear why? Yes, to gather feedback but perhaps not motivated very well, you could go into more detail on this. Is the post valuable? in my opinion not exactly, but that might just be because i value […]

Blog comment Simon Ågren

What: I get that you are trying to put focus on the user stories.
How: you make it clear that you broke down the user stories onto a page of ideas and used them to plan your sprints.
Why: you wrote that the user stories made it for your team to understand the coming tasks but It’s hard for me to see how as you don’t go into any further details to motivate how it has actually been useful.
The post is valuable […]

Postmortem: Aetherial Archon

It’s been a rough road and a hectic ten weeks (especially the last one) but team Archon managed to pull together and complete our game. Am i happy with how the game turned out? As a whole I don’t dislike how the game turned out, I am however dissatisfied with my own lack of contribution. I have spent the most of the ten weeks trying to figure out what my role as lead designer meant to me and the team. […]

Feedback Implementation

So I made a previous post about how i approached gathering feedback from the play-testing sessions, this time i will write about how that feedback influenced our game.
Now the first thing I need to make clear is that the feedback has barely impacted anything major in our game that already exists and I’ll try to explain why. The biggest reason is usually because of a shift of focus on what is worked on. For example; from the latest play-testing session […]

Level Design

The most important task i currently have ongoing is creating the level layouts for our game. Aetherial has an aesthetic goal of making the player feel like a champion, of which I interpret the difficulty of the game will largely convey.  And so I am attempting to find a good balance between making the game difficult while at the same time empowering the player, making them feel like they are really good at the game quickly.
Creating and testing levels is […]

Scrum in Archon

Working with scrum has been useful to plan out workflow but difficult because the team fails at the execution. While we were all given some prior knowledge of what scrum entails, nobody in the group has had any  practical experience with it before. The team has done a great job of planning and distributing work for each sprint and everyone (almost always) actively attends the daily stand-up meetings. The issues come with gauging work hours needed compared to actual work […]

Feedback Gathering

So last monday (02/12) we had a play-testing session class where we could test all the other teams games and give feedback. I won’t go into much detail on the playtesting and the results in and of them selves since we are to write a post with playtesting as the topic later. What I will write about is my teams approach to gathering data from testers and my task in this as lead designer.
I monitored our game during the whole play-testing […]

Week one

My group called Archon and I are working on a game called Aetherial (concept created by team Vampire). The game is a “shoot em up” where you as the player has to hunt down a giant flying evil whale on an alien planet (essentially Moby Dick in the sky).

As my Groups Design designer I am in charge of User Stories.
“User Stories are short descriptions of a game, tool, or pipeline feature that has a clear value to a user. If the […]