Symbiosis Week 2 – Planning and building

To say that it’s only the second week I work on this would be a lie. I have worked on the concept and idea for this game for about four months. But it is only two weeks of having a full team and beginning to build this game.
This is the last course of year two at Uppsala University and will span 8 weeks of development before the exhibition of Gotland Game Conference.
Symbiosis is a single player game where you control […]

Big Game Project

I am currently involved in a video game project in the course Big Game Project at Uppsala University – Campus Gotland. I am working in a team of seven members and we are creating a game called The Runes of Kalevala which is based on the Finnish folklore Kalevala. I am the producer in the team, which means that I (among other things) will be in charge of the project planning. Since the team is producing the game by using the […]

Synapse – A Big Game Project – First Post

Well then, I’m back to my old blog again. I will be doing posts every week from this day forward, to the end of May. 

I’m now reading the last course of the second year of Game Design in Campus Gotland, the Big Game Project. This is the examination course of this year, where teams of between 5-9 members will be working on a two-month game project, similar to the previous year’s course during the same period, Theme Park. 

At the end […]

Big Game: Week 2

For the second week, I started working on the base meshes of the enemies and traps. I also had to do some concept art, since we hadn’t completely decided what they should look like. I also put quite a lot of time into creating working prefabs for each mesh.
Here’s some concepts I did, which we decided to use:


Above is the flying enemy to the left and the shooting enemy to the right. The flying enemy won’t have a […]

Art Fusion

As the art director for our big game project The Runes Of Kalevala, I recently started working on an internal art direction document.
Before the course started I was approached by our game designer, and was asked to collaborate on a project with him. The designer wanted me to develop an art style that was representative for the project he was working on. The project was presented to me as a draft of a concept document which featured finish mythology.
I was […]

Trust week 2

It’s decided, our new game is called Trust! Very happy about the name since it’s so short and to the point, but still very much describes the game. You need to trust your fellow player and choose who among the forest creatures you are to trust.
This week I’ve spent mostly on doing the front page for our design document. It looks a little like this: 
I did not make the logo (the Trust text) but I made everything else. My hope […]

Designing UI

This last week I’ve been working on our games UI layout and design. This has proven to be a real challenge. While our game isn’t a true real time strategy game it does have elements from one, this lead to there being a lot of information that need to be shown on screen. Below is a screenshot from our prototype.

This is the current layout. The left display features information about the currently selected settler. A portrait, health and hunger bar, […]

The Runes of Kalevala – Developer’s blog

I know, I’m a terrible blogger, maybe I’m too old to get into the groove of putting my thoughts out into cyberspace every week.
Tasteful Games, the startup that I’ve been a part of for a year now is finally ready to begin work on a project we’re actually looking to bring to market. Being students we’ve had the privilege of slowly learning our craft and testing the waters for 2 years before going at it for real.
The game we’re making […]

University Projects: Synapse

So, New game project!
Project is called Synapse and is a serious game, the game should teach the player about how the brain works and what different parts does. The game is 2D and heavily based upon using comedic animations.
Overall the game has been moving forward, we have had some misfortune as our lead designer was sick most of last week.
I’ve been working with the project plan, SCRUMing and making a base background for our animations. The project plan was smooth […]

Big Game Blog 2

Shader Funtimes
So for this week i have been doing a lot of different things. But some of the most interesting was to create some custom shaders. This is not any final stuff, and i still have some figuring out to do in order to make use of the efficiently. But anyways, here are some refraction shader variations i created using shaderforge:
Watch below! (if you can bear the horrible gif. quality)
Possible water refractions
//giphy.com/embed/aDwGuCJyBnocw
Working on some possible projectile effects
//giphy.com/embed/moh3eAoYAL5aU
 

Big Game Blog 1

Preparing the main character – Neiva
So its time for some mandatory blogging for Big Game project. So for eight (or something) weeks i am going to be updating here about some of the stuff i am working on. So for this week: skinning and rigging preparation!
So we got ourselves a main character called Neiva. And Neiva is supposed to jump and run around and behave in your typical animated fashion. So to do this we need a rigged and skinned […]

Big Game: Week 1

During the first week of production, the main task was to create the player character of our game. Here’s the concept:

Modeling and creating a UVW of her head was a lot of pain and resulted in some difficulties with distortions when creating the textures, but I eventually ended up with with an acceptable result. Emissive glow would also be a big part of the character design, which meant I had to play around a bit in Unity to figure out how […]