Post mortem: Team Bugbear Umibozu

My previous posts have been detailing the design and production process of a game me and a couple of fellow students have been producing for a course in game design. Now the project is over and it is time to reflect on the experience.
In the end I think most of me group are feeling a bit disappointed with the end result. We ended up having to cut a bunch of features due to time pressure, whilst also having to hastily […]

How (not) to Handle Playtesting

During the development process we had a couple of playtesting sessions where me and my team, together with all of the other teams, gathered to show and play each others games. The reason we did this was to give us an outsider’s perspective on how the games felt to play. Things that are obvious to you when you are building the game might be completely alien to someone who isn’t involved in the creation process. This is something we struggled […]

Catching up

Describing Scrum and me and my groups experience with is all well and good, but I also want to go over some of the things I have been producing these last two weeks. Right now we are coming up on the Beta deadline for our project, and, due to some of the reasons stated in my previous blog post, we are a little bit behind in terms of art assets. Which meant that it has been the time for me […]

Ready, set, Scrum!

In order to keep track of our progress and make sure that we keep on schedule me and my group have been using an Agile development methodology called Scrum. The goal is to constantly work towards creating a minimum viable product, and iterating on that until the product has the features and quality desired. It is also characterized by working in small teams with short daily meetings in order to make sure that everyone knows what is going within the […]

Swimming in the Right Direction

Lately I’ve been working on a swimming shark that is going to be used for two different school projects. It is one of two animations I’m doing for an animation assignment, and it is also going to be the animation of one of the enemies in the game I am making for another course. The biggest challenge when working with this animation has been to balance the different criteria that this animation needs to fulfill. I want it to look […]

Enemies lurking in the mist

In game design, the enemies that you create might in some cases be more important than the player character. Right now me and a team of five other people are developing a game based on a game concept someone else created. The game is called Umibozu, and you play as a curious fisherman trying to find the mystical creature called Umibozu. Lost in a dense fog you have to avoid obstacles, pick up energy crates to […]

Dagger – Finally Done!

So I finally took the time to complete the dagger I started on a long while back before being interrupted by christmas and the artwar contest among other things. Anyway here it is!

Blade of Eternal hemorrage by cobrabird on Sketchfab

I do think that my colour skills are improving, as well as my skills in the handpainted style, but I […]

Hearing the Call

This is something that I have been working on in my spare time for a while now, and I think I am about ready to call it done. With this I mostly wanted to work on my colour skills and apply some of the ideas and techniques that I learnt while working on my sword and dagger that I made previously. (Finished pics of the dagger will be coming up in a near future)

What I wanted […]

Design Thoughts: Playtesting Thoughts

Was at a playtesting event for projects today and it was amazing seeing how good people are at making games.
First year students making 3d Mech combat games, communication games where you have to navigate a smuggler ship together through mazes, a frog that inflates and deflates itself and just many, many more things.
Second years doing innovative racing and turn based strategy games, games about digging out people from bomb debris as well as a game where you have to solve […]

Keeping the distance

There has been a long weekend but I have implemented a distance check. This will also be the firing range later on. It was really simple. It is an new integer member of tank’s base class Agent. I call it distanceUnits. I just assign it the number two for now. When I search the path from the behavior tree, I also fill the tank’s path list. The path finding algorithm fills its own path list by adding the goal node and […]

Design Thoughts: When are you done?

Just gonna make a small post about some thoughts I had today, when is a game done? when is that idea done? When is the creative process over?
The more I play around with this though I have started to understand that it is never over, I create new game ideas daily, but they rarely ever get to  a prototyping stage, rarely ever more then a what if?

But when the thoughts actually materialize into something and you start working on it, […]

What next?

As the title suggests, I am not sure what to do next. Let me try to see what I want to have.

three different characters for each team. They are a tank, a long range shooter and a close combat unit.
Tank moves slowly and has a lot of hp. Fires slowly but powerfully.
The long range shooter fires from a long distance, powerful shots and low hp.
The close combat unit moves quickly, hits hard and has more hp than the long range […]