Alpha presentation

During this week I have been focusing on preparing for the Alpha presentation. Being a project leader, many people expect you to be the one who are representing the game the group are creating. It is an unwritten rule; a rule you just follow. My team members did not tell me in person to be the representative of the game for the Alpha presentation. However, since this unwritten rule is circulating in the air, I felt a pressure on my […]

Week #2 – Setting up Git with Unity

What is Git(hub)? 
I spent a lot of time this week on our game’s Version Control System (VCS). In short, the VCS keeps track of versions of files in the game, including scripts, animations, sprite sheets, scenes etc. In collaboration with my lead programmer, Oskar Karlsson, we set up a basic Github server and provided all group members with access so that they could upload what they were working on without using a more cumbersome tool like Google Drive or […]

Communication

Communication is a broad topic, the importance of which can not be understated no matter the circumstance. Good communication is also a vital component of a successful game development team. A game development team needs to communicate many different things of differing nature. Requirements, progress, feedback, bug reports and much more is part of the daily communication in a game development team. Channels of communication are set up specifically for the project or are defined from the outside (company standard, […]

When things don’t go according to plan

Welcome back! This weeks post will be about some of the issues and struggles I have experienced while coaching my team as a scrum master, and how I plan on resolving these issues. It might be a bit dry, so I apologize in advance.
The members of the project I am currently in charge of have during these past few weeks had massive issues with successfully delivering on the tasks that they had picked during our sprint planning sessions. Each sprint […]

Dev Blog #2 -The UI

This week I wanted to talk about our UI, which mainly consists of the health and aether bars.
First iteration.
When we thought about how we would design the UI we wanted to do it “portrait style”, but since the player avatar is a ship and not a person we chose to portray the bow of the ship along with its figurehead. Because we needed to do a lot of work during the last sprint and we only have one artist on […]

Pre-alpha story

Hi!
This time I am going to write a story about our pre-alpha meeting with our course representatives.
“It all started on cold, winter Monday, the 5th of February 2018. The day of pre-alpha. It was meant to be the day in which they would check and remind us that we are close to the alpha stage of our project. It also meant that we should have the results of previous two-three weeks. Even though I trusted my teammates, the excitement was felted. It filled the […]

Blog post 2: Music

Hello there.
This week I’m going to talk about the process of finding the right music for the game “Depth”.
Because the game we are creating is supposed to be a survival horror game, the music is very important for the setting. Though we cannot just take any horror music we can find. Since most of the songs we could find are very slow paced, it will not fit with the theme of “last leg”, which means “RUN!”.
For the process of trying […]

Working in a small team

Hi everyone!
In this post I’d like to say something more about working in a 4 men squad, fairly small-sized Scrum group. Our set up is: 2 people in graphic department, one programmer and me as a producer. According to Scrum framework, a team should be cross-functional, which means knowledge of all the aspects of development and design is available to the team. In reality, each of us has little to no prior experience with our minors, so in order to […]

2nd post – Preparing for the Alpha presentation

This week our team will have the Alpha presentation, which is the major milestone in our “Shoot em up” project. During the presentation we will need to present a chosen concept and explain how we interpreted it. We will also have to present 3 things we are satisfied with the project, and 3 things that we had problems with.
While preparing for this presentation, it was easy to come up with problems we were facing when working with the Alpha features. […]

Dear Diary, this week…Blog 2

This week I continued to work on the Alpha Presentation, along with our teams designer. I choose to continue to work on this since it was an important milestone for our group and would be used to decide whether or not the group would be able to continue to work together or be split up and have to join other groups.
While our group had most of the requirements for the Alpha presentation in the game we still needed to implement our power-up […]

Presentation’s Where I Wanna Be

PowerPoint on the beach where the slides are free.
The Alpha Presentation was a perfect subject to put too much effort into instead of doing more important work. I do, however, think it paid off.
I decided that it would be easiest to make the structure by simply copying the topics that were listed as requirements, each slide being on one of the requirements. While I would have preferred to do something more original, it would make the task easier. It would […]

Blog post #2 Monster approach sound

!Link to the music clip at the end!
Team Cockatrice is building a Japanese mythology inspired game. In this game, you as the player traverse a foggy sea while mythical monsters try to get in your way. Even though there are enemies, the game is more about the feeling of threat and the sense of adventure without actually being in danger. So how do you design sound for these monsters?
This week I made several sound effect clips, amongst them were the […]