1-year milestone. Part 2.3: Causes of the group disharmony.

So, what is the point of this section? I know that the motto of our education is “Fail fast and fail a lot”. But I personally prefer fair warnings about where I might fail so that may I pay attention to these queues, rather than stumble blindly around in the darkness. A lot of these things, if not all, can be predicted and foreseen. So instead of failing at the basic stuff, I would have preferred to avoid the potentially […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.2: Detection of the group disharmony.

This part is dedicated to something I was both unfortunate and fortunate to experience during my second project which is, as the title states, a group disharmony. You can also call this simply an unhealthy working environment. In retrospective, I realise that there were many things that I could have done about this situation, but I choose not to act or dismissed my thought as a product of a coincidence. This is the type of a failure that the teachers […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.1: Teamwork and the good stuff.

In this second part of my notes, I’m moving onto the territory of the interaction between us, the students and the team members, on a much more intimate level. As you can imagine, working with the same people for 8 weeks on a small project creates dynamics that are much different from the interactions of a big group of people. I’m going to tell about my impressions of the things that create a positive working environment or as I call […]

One year mark. Part 1.3. Student interactions on the “big” scale.

I must say, that I didn’t think I will be able to even get this far in my train of thought, but it does feel good to continue making notes on my experiences. Okay, onward! This part is about us interacting with each other on a scale of around 100 people in the same lecturing room. I have never participated in an activity that would constantly maintain an amount of people that big (my personal record would be 30 people […]

1-year milestone. Part 1.2: Ideas and Concepts.

One of the most important things in this education, besides working in the groups, is how you handle the ideas. I have to say that being creative is something I missed during my time in linguistics. While an open mind was welcomed, the creativity was highly impaired. If you couldn’t support your train of thought by a reference to already existing works, you’d have some hard time. Only a tenured professor who is steps away from retirement was excused for […]

1-year milestone. Part 1.1: Education and The Calling.

So, the grand Post Mortem begins! I start this first post (excluding the introduction) with my opinions of what sort of education did I get myself into. Onward!
 
The 4 courses and their synergy. I am happy to have been one of the first people to try the new branched out program in Game Design at Campus Gotland. I have heard only positive things about the education in games on Gotland. The change of format was even more appealing to me […]

1-year milestone. Introduction.

Hello and welcome to my blog!
My name is Gleb and I recently finished my first year at Uppsala University in Bachelor Programme in Game Design. During this year I got to meet a lot of different people and experience a lot of things. The most important thing I realised was that I made the right choice by deciding to embrace my passion for games and wanting to create games for others.
So, what is the point of this blog? This blog […]

BGP Post 6

The final week of development came with many quick changes in the groups schedule and in the projects overall layout. At this point the need to actually finish the implementation of all our assets in the game became all the more pressing as we rushed towards our deadline. Even at this point in development some last minute changes were made to our game, affecting our levels layout, mechanics within the game and overall visuals. There were two tasks that called for […]

Playtesting and More… Much More.

Hey everyone,
Sorry for the long pause between blog posts but these past few weeks have been crazy busy… Even busier than the previous post stated!!
So here’s a few things that the group has been up to this past week… Mainly finalising and polishing everything we currently have and getting ready for our hand in dates for Gotland Game Conference (GGC) and Swedish Game Awards (SGA).
Our game has come on leaps and bounds into the 3D world and there’s been plenty of play […]

BGP Fourth Post

After having tested our engines, Unity’s, IK system the results have turned out rather poorly. It would seem like there are a couple of reasons for why this is the case, most of which stem from the simple fact that Unity’s Built-in IK system is somewhat lacking. To explain the first one I will need to describe the basics of how to prepare a character in Unity for animation. As per the methods I have seen you can go about two […]

BGP Third post

An increasing amount of complications have arisen as the question of how we implement our animations into our game engine, unity, becomes more prominent. That is to say, the problem does not lie with the prospect of implementing all of the animations but rather  specific group of them. That group is the one that has our character, the goblin, interact with the tools in the game. Items such as the pliers, the stretcher and the axe are problematic due to […]

Busy, busy, BUSY!

The Team Daemonocle production ship is currently firing on all cylinders! (minus this gloriously sunny first of May on the island). With the first of May coming around so soon we’ve been putting some hard working hours to get ready for the SGA (Swedish Game Awards) and the GGC (Gotland Game Conference) deadlines.
The programmers, Alex and Leevi, and our lead design, David, have been swatting those bugs in ‘Unity’ and keeping the DynaMine cart running as smooth as possible… There’s a […]