Inactivity

This week has been low on the activity front, not much has been done. We got our group assignments and my group got the word: interesting, suit.
While both are kind of fun I must say that I found the word “interesting” to be a little too broad. From what persons perspective are we thinking of? Is it interesting for the designer, programmer, consumer, producer or maybe the publisher?
While we had to interpret this question ourselves we have gone with our […]

Game Jam: Doom’s Date

A couple of days ago we had a game jam at our university. In a game jam usually you get words and you have to create a game containing those words. The words that were given to us was “Everyday” and “Doom”. We had 7 hours to complete this game using game maker, we decided pretty quickly about something that we thought was doable during that short period. We decided to make a dating game where the player had to […]

Game Jam: Doom’s Date

A couple of days ago we had a game jam at our university. In a game jam usually you get words and you have to create a game containing those words. The words that were given to us was “Everyday” and “Doom”. We had 7 hours to complete this game using game maker, we decided pretty quickly about something that we thought was doable during that short period. We decided to make a dating game where the player had to […]

Last Friday we had an event called Game Jam, which was completely optional and was done on our spare time. We competed in teams of five people who could make the best game in only seven hours from the theme Everyday Doom (if i remember correctly). Since three of my teammates had Swedish lessons that occupied the first three hours of the game jam, my team tried to make a game in only four hours. Crazy, huh? And super fun! […]

Board Game Development Thoughts

My team has now begun working on a board game design. We haven’t gotten very far, we’ve mainly settled on a theme and some core concepts for the game. It’s going to be a kind of mix between Settlers and Drakborgen; we love the very risky and unpredictable exploration in Drakborgen and we want to combine that with the resource gathering and building of Settlers. We also want the friendly competition feeling you get from Settlers, where players can sabotage […]

How do you keep yourself from being totally useless in a group ?

Gosh it’s been a while, I can feel I got a few great posts I need to write down.
Lets try writing this one down and we’ll go back as soon as I find some time =)
About 7 years ago I was taught something called Problem-Solving-Preceptive.
P.S.P was a innovative way of showing how people can tackle problems quicker and get your work done.
You are presented to solve your problems with seven really stressful steps in order to find the problem, tackle […]

GameJam

So today we had a GameJam.
Starting at 11:00 we got the words “Doom” & “Everyday”
18:00, 7 Hours later the game based on these word was to be handed in.
Using Gamemaker, a program thats most likely very easy to use… if you know how to…
But now the Challange was to Learn the program AND make a game within the time limit.
We started in my groupe (Andreas Wetter, Christina Ahrén and ofc me)
Quite Fast we got the idea to use a […]

Board game

Two days ago we finally agreed upon the aesthetic goals of the board game that we are creating. We also began working on the wiki-page that we are going to use for the project. If we manage to get the game as we want it to be I believe it will be exciting. Since we don’t have that many details about the game ready yet I’m not going to write about it here, but instead I’m going to write a […]

Adventures in multithreading

In our current course “Advanced C++ for games 2″ we have been working on a software rendering engine using windows GDI were no other abstraction layer or libraries are used. The latest feature is to implement and understand multi-threading, so for this we received the following homework:

Move all state data from WinMain into Globals class.

Basically, a lot of initialization and temporary variables are still in the main function which was moved into a Singleton class “Globals”. Simple.

Implement background worker threads […]

Group work – first week

So we’re supposed to design a space shooter. We got two key words, ”thoughtless” and ”badger”. this week we started with our high concept as well as what the game should be like in general. there is much left to do naturally, but at least we have started on it. I’m supposed to write a story for the game as well as thinking of different categories of enemies to be included in the game.
I’m not sure how elaborate the story […]

Post mortem: Finding the core and steal it’s gold!

Last Monday we got an assignment within our new group to take one game we all like and find out just why we like it and then make a paper prototype of it. At first we thought of adventure games and horror games but getting the feel of adventure and horror is kinda hard to translate into a paper prototype.
After a necessary food break we decided upon Minecraft. And mainly the mining and  crafting perspective but also the community feel […]

What are Serious Games?

In addition to my course in Advanced Game Design, I’m currently also reading a course about Serious Games. This post will explain what a Serious Game is and some examples of their usage
Serious Games
The best way to describe a Serious Game is as a game whose main purpose is not entertainment. Ben Sawyer states that “Serious games are solutions to problems. Any meaningful use of computerized games or game industry resources whose chief function is not entertainment are serious games.” […]