6. How it all ended and what I’ve learned

Hello there, the name is Carl and this will be my last blog post reporting the progress of my game, Depth. In this blog post, I will be talking about what I have learned and how the game turned out.

One of the greatest things with my group was our workflow and communication to the project. The group never had any disputes, we took our time to talk everything over and we were able to have our daily meetings, whether it being meeting up face to face or just talking over Discord. So some of the things I will definitly take away from this experience, group wise, is the communication and workflow.

On a more personal note, the biggest thing that I will take away from this course is my role as a Lead Designer and level designer. Because of this course I could explore different ways of creating levels. Example being when I tried to come up with the concept of the tutorial level, at this point in the education, we had not really had any lectures on what think and not think about. The only thing we had been taught was the thought process behind the earlier Super Mario games, and how they introduce the mechanics through the level. Even though that is a really good introduction to level design, I wanted to explore how other games introduces their controls and mechanics. I started looking into articles pointing out how certain games does it, and one game that was always mentioned was a game called VVVVVV, where the developer introduces the controls and mechanics through subtle hints in the background. By having those two in mind, it became much easier to design a tutorial, and thanks to this, I did not really have to worry about designing the main level because I knew everything had been introduced in the tutorial.
But how did the game turn out to be? I would say that the game turned out pretty well. We managed to make a full and simple playable game, which had mechanics, different enemies, animations and sound effects. During the last playtesting session we recieved a lot of praise on the level design and graphics, as well for our cheesy voice acting we had in the game. The only issues our game faced was a bug with our shrimp enemy, where if the player just ran into them, the shrimp would just bounce off their position and get stunned. This, however, was an easy fix, so my programmer could fix it in no time.
The other issue we had was the difficulty of our game, it became apparent that it was too easy at times, which is something for me as a level designer to take away from.

So, as a summary, what did I learn and how did the game turn out?
I learned the effects of good workflow and communication within a team.
I learned different ways to think about, when it comes to level design.
We managed to create a game, that others found good/impressive.

That was all I had to say this, thank you all for taking the time to read this!

– Group T, Carl HvB

About Carl Hvarfvenius Blomgren

2017 Game Design

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