CoC Development Diary #3

Hello there.
Welcome to another CoC dev blog.
After a couple weeks of doodling around we finally have a somewhat playable game. My main focus for this week? Sound, Sound, Sound. Plus a little bit of scripting for the boss behavior. So before this week we had exact three sound effects and, although they all work as intended, I still feel that they are a bit lackluster.
The first sound I implemented last week was the sound for player’s projectiles. It kinda sounds […]

Absurdly Extravagant Level Design

Imagine if you will, a project manager that is not only a cunning and apt leader, but also a masterful level designer. Seems too good to be true? It is. I am neither. However, since our game designer so rudely disappeared in our moment of need, the team needed someone to  visualize the Echoes of the Abyss dream. Someone with years of experience designing board games. Someone that understood what the player wanted. Someone that could make Rukh great again.
I […]

#3: Backlogs and the push/pull method.

When I started thinking about how my team could get the most out of our backlog I came to think about the problems surrounding how it is utilized. The traditional way is for the management to push items from the backlog. You can think of this like a manager holding “work” in his hands and giving it to a team member telling him to commit to creating this work item until the deadline.
The other way around is for the team […]

#2 The Silent Hero

When times are hard and there is a lot to do you sometimes find a light in the tunnel in the form of a silent hero. Like Sam helpt Frodo in the lord of the rings a friend or colleague sometimes jumps in to carry you through the storm. Whether family members pulling through for you during hard times or friends comforting you through a though part of your life. I don’t know what we would do without our silent […]

CoC Development Diary #2

Hi there.
Welcome to another development diary of the game Crown of Creation.
Our main focus for this week was implementing and polishing all the assets we currently have and show the game on alpha presentation and play testing. The alpha presentation went pretty well I would say.
Personally my job for the week is making the powerpoint for the presentation and implementing sound to our game, and try to fix the boss behavior if possible.
So implementing the sounds was not as simple […]

Blog Number 2

Earlier in the week I went looking for sound online. I found a site with some license free music, however it gave individuals the option of purchasing tracks. I attempted to read the terms of use, as they had something about student use, but because I could not properly understand the text. I plan to go back to the Terms of Use on the page to see if they give students some sort of slack, however I doubt it. I […]

Improving with scrum

I feel like I have more control over the scrum schedule and the whole product backlog and sprint plan now. I have learned how to use the program and how it works, how to think when writing things down. At the start when I created an example schedule only to show our scrum master it lacked alot of things. It contained maybe 10 tasks and I thought that was enough, as I had never seen a game scrum document before. […]

Sound Design

Hello once again my readers.
For this post I will talk about sound design and finding it.
When I first started on the sound I had a big problem finding a site where I could find copyright free sound for the weapons or ambient noise in the game. I tried searching for different sites, but a member of my game design team sent me a link to a website called freesound.org which contains many different sounds completely free.
The biggest problem however except […]

Play testing 1

What
This Monday my group and I had the chance to present our game during the play testing, which gave us the opportunity to receive very valuable feedback on our game. The version of the game that we presented was a kind of pre-alpha edition, we still had to change all the placeholders within the game and add the sounds, as well as tweaking some things that we knew were necessary for the game to be fun (e.g. enemy projectiles).
How
During the […]

How to work with scrum and meeting technics

I have implemented some new meeting technics and a customised way to work with scrum that I will think improve my groups overall productiveness. First, to help us get a clear picture we have been discussing and setting up clear goals each week and those goals are to be implemented and tested in the game, only the can they be put on the sprint plan. We don’t always finish and implement the artefacts but then we have them on standby. […]

Structuring the Documents, Week 2

What?
So last week i described how everyone we’re going to use SCRUM. I also told you that some people did not read up on what it is and that kind of leads us to this week’s topics, Structuring the documents. In a project like this, and especially for a project manager, it is not only about the SCRUM chart. Its also about planning meeting, taking notes and with that documenting ideas. All of this is done in different documents to […]

Week 4

 
This week has been somewhat of a turning point for my group since we feel like we actually have an idea of what the end goal of our game is, for the first time since the start of the project. The alfa prototype is done and now it is time to iterate further and polish everything to the nines! One of my tasks has been to create art for one of the enemies in the game, a mean worm. It […]