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 […]

Catching up

Describing Scrum and me and my groups experience with is all well and good, but I also want to go over some of the things I have been producing these last two weeks. Right now we are coming up on the Beta deadline for our project, and, due to some of the reasons stated in my previous blog post, we are a little bit behind in terms of art assets. Which meant that it has been the time for me […]

Ready, set, Scrum!

In order to keep track of our progress and make sure that we keep on schedule me and my group have been using an Agile development methodology called Scrum. The goal is to constantly work towards creating a minimum viable product, and iterating on that until the product has the features and quality desired. It is also characterized by working in small teams with short daily meetings in order to make sure that everyone knows what is going within the […]

Swimming in the Right Direction

Lately I’ve been working on a swimming shark that is going to be used for two different school projects. It is one of two animations I’m doing for an animation assignment, and it is also going to be the animation of one of the enemies in the game I am making for another course. The biggest challenge when working with this animation has been to balance the different criteria that this animation needs to fulfill. I want it to look […]

Enemies lurking in the mist

In game design, the enemies that you create might in some cases be more important than the player character. Right now me and a team of five other people are developing a game based on a game concept someone else created. The game is called Umibozu, and you play as a curious fisherman trying to find the mystical creature called Umibozu. Lost in a dense fog you have to avoid obstacles, pick up energy crates to […]

Big Game Project, Week 1-2

Hello again, it is once again time to fill this blog with some content.
A couple of weeks ago I started a course in which we students are tasked with creating a game during this time. The game is supposed to have market viability, even though we aren’t expected to have a complete game at the end of the course. Instead we are a creating vertical slices or demos of our games which showcase the essentials of  the game.
At the start […]

Board Game Analysis: Stratego

Stratego is two player competitive board game. The goal of Stratego is to capture the other player’s flag or eliminate the other player’s army. On the surface Stratego looks and plays somewhat familiar to other strategic board games such as chess, but some mechanics makes Stratego stand out.

Stratego has existed for a long time, the version that is played today can be tracked to have existed before the first world war, and the rules of that game can be traced […]

Board game Analysis, Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a well known board game released in the year 2000. Set in the medieval age, the players try to occupy as much of the land as possible. Roads, farms, cities and cloisters are all fought over in an attempt to come out with the most points in the end.

Objects
The main objects in Carcassonne are the terrain tiles, which are used to build the board, and the followers, which are used to gain points. Each player starts with a […]

Upgrades for Everyone!

Last week I talked about the picture I made that shows how much you’ve upgraded your character’s outfit. I only talked about the first one last week so it seems fitting to talk about the other two levels this week.

These pictures are supposed to show progression as you upgrade your character. The reason why we decided on adding these pictures is because it is hard to tell exactly what happens to your character’s sprite because it is so small when […]

Let’s Talk About Something Else

At last I am free from making sprites. For now at least. Last week I made every version of the main character sprite, nine in total. If you are not sure what I mean it is as follows: In our game we have a main character. You can upgrade her clothes and weapon independently, with three levels each. This means that I had to create sprites of the main character with a first level suit and weapons one, two and […]

Sprites again?

If you’ve been following this blog, you will know a fair bit about the sprites I’ve been making. Last week I talked about the level two sprite. The logical progression is that today I will be talking about the level three sprite, which I will.
The level three sprite was a mixed bag of obstacles. The weapon she would be using had no clear concept at all, the only thing that was set in stone was that it was supposed to […]