Week 8 – GGC just begun

This is the moment we have all been waiting for, and working incredibly hard towards.
As I write this, our booth is being crowded with people playing F.R.A.U.S and giving feedback into what they think. So far, it has been majorly positive, even more than I could have imagined.
The difficulty that previously was a concern is actually something some people have been praising, as it adds that extra depth and sense of failure that makes the players feel that much more […]

Week 7 Visuals!

Only one more week until the conference! Things are getting close to being done, bug fixing, polishing, and fixing the last things with the UI and creating better readability for the game overall is what is on the table at the moment.
We found numerous times that the game was quite difficult to grasp as items and objects the player could interact with blended in with the rest of the game world too much and thus became indistinguishable. What I and […]

Week 6 – Yet another week

Our team most certainly have run into a ton of bad luck when it comes to health.
This week, almost the entire team succumbed to sickness once again. The most probable reason is lack of eating properly and lack of sleep, and that can be attributed to the fact that we crunched last week in order to make it for the alpha.
This leads to an inevitable revelation that crunching… costs more than it gives, at least I can imagine it does […]

Week 5 – Alpha stress

This week have been the most stressful one thus far, this week we had the alpha deadline where a jury-staff visited the office and play-tested the game. As usual, a few hours before the deadline a game breaking never before seen bug was discovered and thus the entire game went down in a spiral of bug after bug attempting to fix it. And this happened despite us crunching to midnight nearly every day this week in order to avoid exactly […]

Week 4 – Visuals nearly getting there!

This week have been rather sporadic, I have been flailing around all over on various tasks and areas for the game.
The visuals are even closer than before to being finalized, it went by quite quickly once it became clear what we wanted the game to look like, what remains is mainly polish, polish and some more polish.

Note: Yes the giant red boxes and red/blue bars are indeed placeholders.

What remains is designing the UI, implementing it and after that, the game […]

Week 3 – Shaders and lookdev

This week have been spent mostly with attempting to identify what the game will look after some concerns were raised with the previous visions we had.
In order to sell the idea that you are in fact playing as an AI we need to first figure out an impossible to answer question. “What would the world look like to an seemingly omniscient AI?”
There is no right answer to this impossible to answer question obviously, thus we needed to experiment to find […]

Week 2 – BaseMesh and BaseAnimation

The second week in development have now passed.
The development in different areas for the game, whether it have been art or code have had quite a mixed progress.
On the art side, which is mine, we have begun to white-box a level to test various level layouts and see if the scale we are working in is adequate for the project, and if there are any mismatches. It would be quite funny looking if we had a chair for a giant […]

Week 1 – Big Game Project Catch-up

It is that time of the year again.
It is time to develop a game, a vertical slice for Gotland Game Conference where me and my great team will exhibit a game concept we have had in the making for quite a while now. And this mysterious game for the time being is called F.R.A.U.S.
This post is the first of many to come, and the purpose with this one is to catch up with what I have been doing in the […]

Oh boy, the blog neglect is off the charts!

Oh hello dear blog!
It turns out this blog have suffered from a severe case of neglect, I think maybe it is about time to change that, at least for a little bit.
So, to summarize what have happened since the last blog post.
We have attended our first year of GGC (Gotland Game Conference)

We created the game Colors of the wind, and we won Almedalen award! Which means that our game is being on display for all to see and play in […]

Final thoughts before game turn in. Game Designers perspective.

Hello again!
At last, we are the final mandatory blog post for this course, I must say, it has been a great ride with many ups and downs. In the end, I believe everyone in our team comes out as both better prepared and stronger individuals with a much broader skillset. Creating interactive entertainment is now a greater part of our lives.
This week I will sort of give a short post-mortem on how our development process have been, what could have […]

Hello and welcome back to my journey in game design and game development!
This week I will cover the creation of the graphics for our parallax effects!
In our game we are navigating on a spaceship and in order to create some sort of depth on our game (considering it is strictly top-down), we needed some sort of backdrop or similar in order to make it more visually pleasing to play.
So we decided to design our map in a similar fashion to […]

Level/Room transitions!

Hello again!
This week I will cover an interesting problem I encountered this week. The solution to the issue is probably obvious, but…Hopefully some good suggestions will come out of the comments! 🙂
So, in order to get some clarity on the issue, I need to explain how our game will handle levels/rooms.
We will render out ONE room at a time, when we go into a new room, the old room we was in will basically be deleted, flushed out of the system […]