Postmortem: Team Qilin’s Aetherial

Finally! The end has come! This project have been somewhat hellish, and reaching the end feels more freeing than I’d care to admit (although I suppose I just did). Many things went wrong, but many things did also go right, and the fact that we made it is something I’m very proud of.
 
In the end, team Qilin’s Aetherial turned into a quite simple shoot ‘em up in which players operate a flying ship hunting down a murderous invading Moby Dick […]

The Wonders of Playtesting

This week I shall tell you of the wonders of playtesting and the effect it has had on team Qilin.
During this ten week project, we have had two playtesting sessions, both of which have been tremendously helpful in the development process. For our first playtest in anticipation of the Alpha we didn’t have much of a game to present, it was a never-ending level with only two enemies and no power up. Despite having very little to show, we received […]

An over-whale-ming amount of whales

Yet another week spent dealing with whales, this time in the form of animation. A couple of weeks ago we made animations for our graphics class, and I made the choice to animate the boss of our game – Aetherial. In our version of the game, that boss is a whale inspired by Moby Dick, a design choice that can be read about here. I of course also made the animations because they were a requirement for the game, […]

Comments On Other Blogs So Far

A compilation of the comments I have written on other people’s blogs so far.
Week 1 – Sofie
Hi, I’m Emma of team Qilin.
I liked your post, it was an interesting blog entry which in a pedagogical way explains what you’ve done, how and why. It would have been great if you’d added some images, as it would have been nice to see what the final outcomes were. You’ve explained what you did and how you did it, which was great! However, […]

ScrumPost

Welcome to week three of the blog adventure! This time, tune in for a reflection about scrum.
In team Qilin we have practiced scrum, as it is one of the course requirements. I have never used scrum before, nor has (I think) anyone else on the team, which has made this something of an experiment. It’s worked out decently for us, some weeks have been better than others, but generally it’s been fine.
The daily standups have been helpful, I personally need to […]

Whale, Whale, Whale – a design process

This week we’ll take a look at the design of the boss. I designed and drew everything in Photoshop CC 2017.
The antagonist and final boss of Aetherial is a whale by the name of Leviathan. Team Qilin, or rather I, chose to look away from the whole sea-monster thing and instead focus on the Moby Dick side of the game. The Moby Dick influences came from the tagline of the Concept Document; “Moby Dick of the skies”. Moby Dick was […]

General Ship Design

The avatar of Aetherial is a ship, as was decided in the concept document. I, however, decided to redesign it somewhat, as the original design was perhaps not the most logical. It was very beautiful, but it didn’t really have sails per se, it was more like it had wings. I also knew that I would have to animate it, and animating a character that I had no idea how to draw seemed hard to do as my first attempt […]