Design Feedback – 6

Congratulations to your finished game. I did play it several times during the different play testing sessions and you could clearly see a progression from alpha to the finished product. I like how you took some answers from the latest playtesting and posted it in here, it gives you a feel from what people thought of the released version of the game.
I would have liked to know even more about your group’s dynamic. How you worked together, what were the […]

Design Blog – 6

Postmortem
Final Playtest
Yesterday, thursday, was our final playtest. We presented our released version to the testers. We all worked our butts off the day before and the morning before the testing. Making sure there weren’t any bugs or overall fixes that needed to be done. It was a stressful period but I’d say we pulled through, much thanks to our coders that put in so much energy and effort to this project. The testers generally liked our final product. It was […]

Design Feedback – 5

I like this blog post for several reasons. The main reason is how open you are with the game’s state and your role as a scrum master/product owner. That you can look at yourself and critique is a very crucial thing to do in order to learn. We all struggle, sometimes more, sometimes less. I think you will benefit from this and take this experience and make something valuable out of it.
It is never a good feeling when you know […]

Design Blog – 5

Playtesting
First Playtest
Our first playtest went I guess kind of well. Something that we noticed was that testers did not use the ‘heavy’ shot. The heavy shot or the laser needs to be loaded up for four seconds before it fires. Testers found it confusing and did not see (nor hear because we did not have any sound effects at the time) when the cannon was charging up the laser. This was the main issue from the playtest. This is something […]

Design Feedback – 4

You are describing well your thought-process behind the music for the game. It amazes me how accurate and detailed your decisions were behind all of this. In a very clear manner you describe the background to your game and how other cultural influences your music for your boss level. I’ve listened to the track multiple times and I can really get the feel for the Umibozu aesthetic. It is very spooky and it adds something extra when playing a mysterious […]

Design Feedback – 2

I feel you have in a clear manner explained the design decisions behind the new power-up. I did test your game and was not entirely clear what the power-up was and how I was affected by it. The new one seems very interesting indeed. Two things I would like to adress it how you are going to communicate to the player that it you should press down either ALT or CTRL for the different power-up. Since the given aesthetic is […]

Design Feedback – 3

You write in a clear and understanding way. Even though it is hard to get an image of “scrum” per se, it would have been something that would make the blog post more attractive. I get the general idea of scrum when reading your post and what it has done for the team overall. I would have liked to know more what in depth, what you put in the backlog and how it affected your work. Did you have to […]

Design Feedback – 1

I feel that the blog for this week is very direct on its subject. To break down a character and its features with User Stories. It shows that you have thought carefully about the design behind the whale and then taking it to your team to discuss it ever further. You address it as a team effort and it is vital to use User Stories, in order to break down and question the different aspects of the whale. I definitely […]

Design Blog – 4

Drones
The very first enemy
The Drone is the first enemy the player encounter. It has low health and cannot shoot. In the concept document it was called “Kamikaze”, which by indicated by its name flew into the Behemoth to deal damage. The Drone in our game does this aswell. It moves towards the Behemoth to crash into it but we changed the name cause a “Drone” sounds and it is easier to pronounce.
Stats for the Drone
In the design document I’ve made […]

Design Blog – 3

Scrum
Introduction
I feel the development of our game has been mostly positive for our group. Every time we make a sprint, we get together and discuss what we will be working on for the upcoming week. If there’s some downside with planning our sprints it’s just too short. A week goes by so fast and the tasks we work on would sometimes need more adjustments and iterations. The same task can be worked on the next sprint and in some cases […]

Design Blog – 2

Start Menu
Introduction
To start off this post I need to refer to our playtest session we had last monday. There I learned even more about our game and what flaws it had. One of the big flaws were that the players did not fully understand the controls of the game. We gave them a sheet of paper with all the controls but it was all still very confusing to them. One feature that did not properly communicate to the players were […]

Design Blog – 1

Shield Mechanic
Last week we implemented the shield function to our upcoming game. Our player avatar, referred as “Behemoth”, has multiple mechanics and protecting yourself is one of them. The Behemoth has four different placement for its shield. Each placement for the shield has its own key bind to it. Starting from the top of the avatar the key binds are as follows:
Key Input 
Shield placement 1: H
Shield placement 2: J
Shield placement 3: K
Shield placement 4: L
Preventing Fire and Killing Enemies
As you […]