Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 6, Design Document

No one ever reads the design document…The tale of a game designerWelcome back to another Magic Writer design blog post! This week is the last one and I’ll be writing a more overarching post about our teams design document.
I’m the lead designer for magic writer, and in the early stages of our project I was the sole designer. I tasked myself with writing the whole design document and doing all the design work. This turned out to be much harder […]

Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 5, Level Design

Level Design? Who needs it in an endless runner? Well, it’s more vital than what you think. The week before the Beta and no level design proved pretty stupid. Let’s go through how It was solved.
Welcome to another design blog post for Magic Writer!
Until last week, we had no one working on level design. When I took the task of setting up the wavesystem (making the monster reset after each wave of monsters), I realized that I had no idea […]

Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 4, Controls

Of course I can control my character, it’s something unimportant to fix for later. Or is it? Magic Writer’s control scheme has went through several changes during development all for users better enjoyment of the game.
Hello there and welcome to another Design blog post for Magic Writer.
During the development of Magic Writer, we’ve had discussion regarding the control scheme for the game several times. Both teachers and members as well as playtesters have voiced their opinion on the matter loudly. […]

Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 3, The ever-moving focus

The information players can gather from the screen is very important. It’s extra important in a game of stress where they need to know the situation at just a glance to be able to plan their next move in time. It’s time to give them that information.Welcome back to another Magic Writer design post.
One issue which came up in a recent discussion with our teacher and senior was the focus of our game. And when I say focus, I’m talking […]

Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 2, Designing the Weakness System

After playtesting and iterating, one thing the team still tries to improve is the weakness system of magic writer. Why is it there and how did we change it.
The high concept of  our vision of magic writer is the the following:  Scibblenaut meets typing of the dead.
At it’s core, magic writer is about writing funny items into existing (Scribblenauts) and having a tactical shooter (typing of the dead) at the same time.
At this point, we’re having fun […]

Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 1, Every Pixel a Message

The First weeks of Scrum has passed. What have we accomplished? Hidden storytelling in design.

Not actual picture from the game. But it looks nice!

Design
The first weeks has passed and Magic Writer is coming along fine.
As the lead designer on the project my first main task is writing the design document, which turns out to be much more work than anticipated. But that part is coming along fine ever since we allocated time for me to do […]

Start of new course, Welcome to Magic Writer!

The course introduction happened, we we’re introduced to Scrum and we’ve now met our senior mentor who will act as Scrum Master. It’s time to start the new project!

Magic Writer!
For this project we have:
Simon Lundgren – Lead Designer (that’s me!)Semih Parlayan – Lead CodeAra Mohammed – QAAnders Schultheiss – Lead SoundAndré Bengtsson – Lead ArtMarcus Prytz – Producer
As the lead designer on this project I will write the design document and I will try to envision […]

Making Skelly Dungeon, a Zelda clone part 3

It’s been a slow week since it’s been Christmas and all. Last week I finished movement and for the player and this week I’ve gotten around doing the Rooms. I ran into some problems concerning collision with walls which I’ll sort out later and the next step is managing more rooms as well as switching rooms.

The rooms are now defined and usable! In a text file you write down the name of the room, width, height […]

Making Skelly Dungeon, a Zelda clone part 2

A week has gone by and we’ve gained a foothold on our project we feel confident in. With Github me and Dee can easily work on the project at the same time without trouble. And now that we’ve implemented some of the basic functions I can see the whole project coming together.

What we’ve done this week:

Player can now move and it feels natural
The players animation works while moving. There are a few errors here which will […]

Making Skelly Dungeon, a Zelda clone part 1

I have now started working on the last assignments for the first programming course. The assignment consists of using SDL, a library for media functionality additions to C++, to make a clone of an old school video game.
The Team

On this assignment I’m working together with Dee Majek whom you can find here: https://gamedesignandthings.wordpress.com/

The Game
We’ve chosen the first Zelda game for NES to clone. We wanted to make something along the line of a dungeon crawler inspired buy nethack, but since […]

Third Week of Programming: Back from vacation and Tic Tac Toe

Since I last week wrote about most of the assignments for this week, I’ll talk about one assignment which took more time than the others. Making a game of Tic Tac Toe.

Tic Tac Toe is played on a 3×3 grid in which one player is represented by across and the other player is represented by a circle. The players take turns putting their symbol into the grid and if three of the same symbol align vertically, […]

Second Week of Programming: Making Pong and Doing extra work with Classes

Since I’m going back to Stockholm during week 3’s classes, I asked for the assignments in advance so I could brush up on my old C++ knowledge.
Firstly though, we made pong with SDL(Simple Directmedia Library). A programming library is a set of predefined functions and classes which can aid you in different ways. If I want to make a game, I don’t necessarily need to know how to program the graphics card, but SDL do and helps me with that […]