Veckoreflektion Efter Gotland Game Conference

Nu är kursen avslutad och utställningarna på Gotland Game Conference (G.G.C) är bortplockade.
Under G.G.C har vi fått extremt mycket feedback på vårt spel. Detta av varierad karaktär.  Om det skulle göras en summering av feedbacken med tre ord skulle dessa vara: Spelarstyrning, grafik samt Kamera.
Feedbacken på spelarstyrningen var det som upplevdes mest negativt, i princip alla som prövade spelet hade en åsikt om att det var för svårt att styra bilen spelaren körde. Detta gick hand i hand med att AI-bilarna var för svåra för spelarstyrningen.
Däremot […]

Boxing the map.

In the game The Summoning the players are playing on a terrain made in Unity. The CharacterControllers in Unity can handle slopes upwards, but can’t do it downwards. This is the reason to why we need to create boxes on the map, so the players can’t walk out from it.
Firstly we created a object with a collider and gave it a layer which is called ”WorldBoxes”. Now we can decide what can pass trough the boxes changing the physics in the project. Then the boxes gets extended and […]

Part 6: Why agile is great, and where we failed

The second day of GGC has just ended and I need to ventilate regarding the biggest failure of this project. Failing to work in an agile environment.
What is great with working agile is that you during sprint reviews take a step back after adding a feature, evaluating its design and intent.
As we started working on Rune Mages this was indeed planned. However, something happened early on in the project which today can be seen in the game. Most of the […]

The HP bars.

In the game The Summoning there will be a Demon player and a Human player, which will play against eachother. The Demon are able to spawn units and build buildings which can be commanded. To make this fair, the units will need to have something which indicates the HP, which is why a HP bar has been created.
The HP bars work in the same way as the normal HP bar for the Human, which means that they are Images on a canvas which can be filled. They will however hang […]

Final year at GGC

Two updates in one week? I must be going crazy.
Anyway, as it is my last year here it is also time for my last GGC, at least as a student here. Perhaps I’ll come back sometime in the future! Besides my self help app, which still isn’t finished, I haven’t worked on any game this year, which means I won’t exhibit anything at the conference.
However, I decided to put my work up on the art wall for the first time! […]

Neon Skies – Week 9

This week marks the end of the production phase of the vertical slice for BGP.

The week started with making some props to give more life to the planet. First off I made a U-pipe that would traverse the map, transporting neon colored materials. This gives a sense of industry and a world where you are only a small part.

After that I added the last of the neon battery packs, a larger one with 3 modules. Together with the other props […]

Writing a character… And animating a start menu.

So, since our writer had alot on his plate besides writing for the characters, I took it upon myself to write a bit for one of our driver-characters, Haizea Alonso (see picture below)

Now, this is more or less a result of a big problem with how we planned our project, that being that for a game which main standout feature is the story between races, we haven’t had a proper script during the whole of the development period. We have […]

Unity

To develop the game, we decided to use the game engine Unity. The reasoning behind this was that all the programmers in the team had used this engine before. The other reason was that Unity already had vehicle examples which we could use to make our driving.

The Aim and Purpose

The purpose of the project was to explore if connecting a dialogue system with racing, and affecting an AI to race differently so to create a story that is told both on and off track that is compelling to a player. To make this interesting we designed mechanics where each system affects the other to create dynamics for the player. Along with using MDA to amplify our aesthetic goal of making the player feel like a racing driver.

Design Document

As Lead Designer, my role demanded me to communicate the design of the game to the rest of the team. The easiest and most tested way of doing this is by creating a design document. The document should describe every part of a game, but it should also change during development as testing changes how the game is designed. To properly communicate the design to the team I routinely asked the other team members to read through the document as […]

Planning

After the pitch for the game was approved, a plan was required so that the ones responsible for the course could see that we were going to make the vertical slice within the time allotted for development. In the concept, we had decided what the vertical slice would consist of. The planning was a collaborative effort of the entire group, because each member has an area that they know how much time is necessary for each artifact. In the planning […]

Concept

Before the course started the students received a chance to pitch a game idea. In these pitch sessions, the students received feedback from both members of the institution and their peers. During this stage I wrote the concept for Fast Gear and pitched it during the first one of these sessions. The pitch consisted of the core ideas of Fast Gear from the perspective of improving the racing class Formula 1. The feedback I received from Jakob Berglund Rogert consisted […]