Post mortem (supplementary hand in)

After many weeks of development, our game is finally complete. It changed a whole lot from our starting concept.
Navisy: Creatures of the Deep is a top-down shooter where the player takes the role of a curious fisherman setting out in search for a mythological beast that lurks in the depths. The game has the player steering their fishing boat however they like across an endless sea searching for artifacts that eventually leads to a climactic boss fight, fending off enemy […]

Blog feedback #6

Hi August! Great post!
I really liked your setting when I tested your game. It is very refreshing to see something that isn’t Japanese folklore, like many of the others did for their Umibozu games (myself included).
It’s very sad to hear that you had so much trouble with bugs in your game, especially game breaking ones. Collision can be tricky to program and is often the source of a lot of frustration.
I didn’t complete your game (I died about half way), […]

Postmortem – Game Design 2.

I have learned a lot during this course. Being able to put what we have been tought so far into practise have proven very useful and thanks to our excellent project manager, who’s been very thorough and invested through out, we’ve been able to experience a little bit of what working in the industry will be about.
First, I’d like to start with what have gone well: we actually made a game. I have never been part of a project like […]

Blog feedback #5

Very nicely written Carl!
I think your post is the most well written I’ve read so far. It’s very nicely structured and super easy to read. It’s also very nice to have the graphs in front of you while reading to accompany your thoughts and descriptions.
You describe the process of playtesting (how you go from feedback in a questionaire to tweaking the game accordingly) very well. It is hard to keep viewing one’s project from the outside looking in, so things […]

The power of playtesting

At the start of the project, we decided to make some fundamental changes to the mechanics. Among other things, we changed the way the player moved. I have talked about this in an earlier post so I will keep things short, but the general gist was that we wanted to make the player feel like he/she was on an actual boat. We achieved this by having the boat rotate on an axis instead of instantly strafing left and right as […]

Blog feedback #4

Hi Amanda!
Great post! Well written and structured, it’s very easy for the reader to grasp what you’re talking about. I am the sound designer for my group as well, so reading about other groups’ sound effects is really cool. I particularly like how you layer sounds that people usually wouldn’t consider, like the whale calls and cicadas, to get a very different effect. It’s very creative!
I would, however, have liked to be able to listen to your sound effects. Maybe […]

Something wicked this way comes

While finishing up for the Beta, I have been working on the most prominent track in the game: the boss’ theme song.
Our game, based on the Umibozu concept document, features a large sea monster as its final boss. While the original concept document drew heavily from Japanese culture in both art and mythos, we decided to go a different route with a steampunk setting instead. So, instead of having the ”Umibozu” (sea monster from Japanese folklore), we have the scary […]

Blog feedback #3

Hi Sofie, good post!
Scrum is indeed a great way to work and splitting the work into sprints is a nice method of seeing how far you’ve come, how far you’ve got left and how things need to change.
You seem to know your way around scrum, I don’t have much to add. You did however mention that your group had some problems when your project manager wasn’t present, and I’ll add to that by saying that we have had a lot […]

Blog feedback #2

Well said Axel. Your post is well structured and fairly easy to follow. One thing I have to note is that it’s pretty hard to understand the whys behind the redesigning of the enemy. Or rather, I could use a longer explanation. You mention that the original design both lacked a sense of mechanics and had too complicated mechanics. How? An explanation or a visualisation of the original design would be great here, some simple drawing perhaps. The only thing […]

Blog feedback #1

Your post is clearly made and explained simple enough so that someone who knows very little about line art, like myself, can understand. You state what the post is about early on and keep the red thread through-out with very few to almost none tangents. By the end I understand exactly why paying attention to line art is important and how it affects character design, perceived character personalities and how it can work with the game aesthetic. The post is […]

Scrum and user stories, user stories and scrum.

How did working with scrum affect our development?
Well, it’s been neat. Every Monday we meet at roughly 10:00, unless there is a class, for our sprint planning. Everyone participates in picking out tasks and filling in the form. By the end of the meeting we have a clear understanding about what’s happening and who’s doing what. The meeting is also a perfect opportunity for us to communicate to each other about shortcomings and if we need help with anything. By […]

Spooky tunes.

 
Last week, I decided to sit down and write some music. Umibozu, our game, is a dark and atmospheric game centred around mysteries and sea-dwelling monsters. It is also very much inspired by steampunk with gears, steam and chunky machinery through-out. So, essentially, what I was looking for was ”spooky steampunk”.
After some quick research in the field (i.e. I searched ”steampunk music” on Youtube a couple of times) I found that similar settings usually go for a Baroque or Victorian […]