Game jam, Foodfighters Lunchtime

Last friday there was a game jam at school. A game jam is basically “make a game during this super short amount of time”, and this time it was like under seven hours. Students of first ’til third year and teachers could participate. Also we had to use Game Maker at this jam.
We were three first year student programmers (and we havn’t even had a single lecture in programming as of yet) and two graphical artists, one first year and one […]

Filthy Flashy Game Design

Right now we’re tasked to design a 2D-shoot ’em up game in groups. We were also given two words that we have to design our game from. Our words were “flash” and “filthy”. When I first heard the words we were given I thought it would be hard to make a game based around them because I first thought of them as opposites that couldn’t really exist at the same time. However when we started brainstorming ideas for the game […]

Been working on the concept for Group 9′s game in photoshop.
Started drawing a concept for an antagonists, but looks like it’s not going to be used. I just about got past the sketching stage.
Esbjörn drew a concept for the protagonist which i really liked, so I want to keep going in that style. Ladbon thought it needed some touching up, so I fixed that. This is what it looks like now:

Narratives and Characters

So this post will be about today’s lecture about narratives and characters. 
First up on stage, give it up for the Narratives.
Everything we have done here since I arrived on this island has been so much fun! And today was no exception, since narratives and strong characters are one of the things that I love with (some) video games. We went through the different approaches to writing a good story, like the 3 and 9 act and also “the Hero’s […]

How to manage a team

Being a lead designer is hard. You have to keep up with both your artists, programmers and keep getting information and try not to sound like a douche when taking everything in.
Jesus that’s hard! We already made a schedule for everything but the sooner we’re done with stuff we find ourself doing more and more just because there is so much new we need to balance into the game. Our first real programming meeting went forward one step with the mechanics […]

Game Jam and Traffic lights

Last Friday (11 Oct) there was a Game Jam at the University, for all GAME students (I’ll refer to all who study Game Design and Graphics/Programming as GAME with capital letters).  “Everybody is a Noob Jam” was the fitting title of the jam, and we got to create playable games in about 8 hours. The game had to be made in “Game Maker”, and had to be based upon the two words “Everyday” and “Doom”. Even though me and my […]

Suddenly homeworks! also gamejam review.

So we finally got proper home works, which is why i’m taking the time to write this as a way of procrastination. I’ll make sure to make a blog post that the end of the week to write down what I’ve accomplished in the week.
Anyways, last Friday we had the game jam, and boy did we fail. Well sort of at least.
Our game was the space shooter where you couldn’t shoot properly, and there was no ammo count. We ran […]

First entry: Getting started with the design project.

Sup dawgs, this is the first entry in my school blog, where I’ll be writing about scchool related stuff.
Last week we started off with our Space Shoot-Em-Up game projects. We’ve got the words “Suburbia” and “Supernatural” to work with. Things have been progressing smoothly, fast enough? Can’t say for sure, but at least we’re making progress. The mood in the group is good, however I must admit we had a few disagreements , nothing we haven’t been able to solve […]

Hello world

Welcome to my blog. My name is Esbjörn Holmerin Nord and I’m a game design student at Uppsala University campus Gotland. This blog will follow me on my journey to become a professional in the field of game development. Here I will share my work and thoughts that are related to the education. Expect drawings, 3D-models, thoughts about projects and assignments as well as game design theory.

Thoughtless Badger – Development diary

Sunday 13/09/2013
Thoughtless Badger
Today our intentions was to take a look at the basic ideas for our paper prototype that one of us was supposed to look at. We also took a look at some of the drawings I had made of some of the main characters: badgers, protagonist (both male and female) and some basic surroundings.
I’m not that comfortable with hand drawings, even though you can clearly see what I was going for I feel that I’m better suited with […]

Sunday 13/09/2013
Thoughtless Badger
Today our intentions was to take a look at the basic ideas for our paper prototype that one of us was supposed to look at. We also took a look at some of the drawings I had made of some of the main characters: badgers, protagonist (both male and female) and some basic surroundings. I’m not that comfortable with hand drawings, even though you can clearly see what I was going for I feel that I’m better […]

Thoughtless Badger – Development Diary 2

Wednesday 09/09/2013
Thoughtless Badger
Today we each pitched our individual high concept ideas, trying to brainstorm a core concept.
We each had some good ideas all ranging from distant planets populated all by badgers and other settings were humans ruled the world. Without going into detail, we decided upon one setting where badgers and humans populate the same world, but it is as if they live in separate times and perhaps whole different world. After deciding upon some basic core ideas and concepts […]