Long post ;(

Hello!

I have failed to do as i said in my last post and have not posted anything for a week.

So i says sorry in before hand because this will be a fuck long post. Hope you can live with it otherwise bye bye!

Game design assignment!

Ok so we got new groups for the Game Design course and we got a new assignment. The assignment was that we are to design a game. We were given 2 random words that has to be in the game somehow. The words my group got was “Badger and Thoughtless” the game also has to be in the Shoot’em up genre

My groups has had 3 meetings.

The first meeting we decided on what roles everyone should have. I became producer, this means its up to me to see that everything gets done on time and plan everything.  I will have a second role as an artist as well to help our other two artist in the group.

The second meeting was much longer. we sat for around four hours coming up with our game idea. After a lot of brain storming we came up with the idea that we wanted to have different “modes” in our game. So we came up with tree different modes that help the player in different ways. It was not to hard to implement the word Badger in our game but we had some trouble with thoughtless. I think we should have that covered by now though

The third meeting was a bit shorted and we had all got homework to do in till this meeting. It went ok there was some trouble but at the end we manage to solve most of it. We now have some art work and most of our game mechanics written down. I am a bit stressed if we are doing everything correct and that we will have a good and well prepared game at the end. But i believe in my group and i have asked one of the “help teachers” to look at our work so i can get a grip on how well everything is going. We have another big meeting on Sunday were we will sit and start working on the paper prototype of our game. I also have to have some sketches of our UI in till then. I have started but I am not to happy about it yet. We also have a small meeting on Thursday just to check that everything is going well for everyone.

Paper Prototype postmortem 

Last week during the lecture we got an assignment to take a digital game and make a paper prototype of it.

So we were supposed to analyse the game and find the core mechanics and then make a paperprototyp from it

My group choose Maria Cart. It went rather well but we had some things i would want to change or done different so this is my postmortem of that assignment.

I would liked to have worked more on the map because that is what the play testers thought was bad. It took far to much time to get to the finish line and add some more things to make the map more feel like Mario cart. We wanted to break a bit from Mario cart and make it our own, this was both our downfall and our highlight. It was our own Maria Cart and the mechanics worked well. The map though should have been made shorter and have a better relationship to our “spell cards” What i think we did good was that we play tested our prototype a few times so we could change our cards more. This was very great and something that i will take with me for future projects. It is vital to test your game plenty of times. But our focus was to much on the “spell cards” if we would have thought more about the actuate map our game would have been much much better.

Our map had two lanes that made gave a more feel that you could overtake your opponent. What we could have added though was that at some points there were more lanes and things that might have given you a boost so you wanted to go on different lanes.

Another thing that we could have changed was that the people in the lead didn’t think the game was that much fun because they stood still most of the game. This of course is a bad thing though it is one of the core things in Mario cart that the person in lead has the highest disadvantage. We could have changed it somehow so the player didn’t just sit still all the time. like changing that instead of skipping a turn when you got hit by something you might have to move back a few steps or something like that. What we did have though was that the you could still put down “spell cards” even though you have to skip your turn. But it was not enough to make the players in the lead feel like they had something to do. To fix this we could add more cards and change the limit of cards you are allowed to stack ( we had a max of 3 cards in your hand ) to a high number. This would also add some tactics that you need to think if it you want to save up on cards so you can survive being in the lead or if you just use them to fuck for other players.

GameJam!

Yaay gamejam! So last Friday i had my first gamejam and it was awesome!

A gamejam is where in groups and with a restriction you have to make a game in a limited time. Our restrictions or words for this gamejam was “Everyday doom” we also had to use the program Gamemaker that i linked in an earlier post

It was an awesome experience and i had a blast. Even though my groups game never made it to the finish line i think we all had fun ( maybe not the programmers ) our idea was to make a click game where you tell your avatar to do different things and then everything go to hell. Like eating breakfast, if you pressed it a picture would come up where it told you that the milk was all out. The programmers had some trouble making everything work but i don’t blame then. Of course it was sad that our game didn’t make it but i got to draw a lot and i learnt first hand what “Killing your darlings” meant.

Here are some of the art that me and Seamus Newman made for the game!

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Change!

I wrote in my a old post about me making a game a week in game maker  and that i was working on a game at the time. Well that didn’t really work out. I scraped that idea and started working on a new game with Tomas (http://sked86.wordpress.com his blog) but we scraped that idea as well and are now working with a bigger team with a new rpg game that we are going to realese sometime next year. The group consist of Me as a producer, story write and artist. Wilhelm Jansson as artist and lvl designer. Seamus Newman as Lead artist and bullbakare. Laban Melander as programmer and then Tomas  Lindell as Lead Programmer and Lead designer. Our team name is Viking Entertainment (we will probably make a website soon). We are all looking forward to this project. Will write more about it when we start getting somewhere!

here are pictures for sprites that i made for the projects that i have scraped they are very small so you might not see that much put save them or just zoom a fuck loads:

This week!

Well now for everything that is and happened this week.

I am feeling rather stressed because there is a shit loads of things that i have to do. I have to finish a Swedish assignment for tomorrow and then i have to work with my group for the designing assignment and on top of that i have to work on a story for Viking Entertainment and play through Bioshock infinite and analyse the story and a character from there. Of course this is all fun ( except the Swedish) but it is a lot of shit to do. so i leave you now to study! Yaaay… ;( also i will try to blog more!

bye bye bye bye bye byeb yeb cya later and all that!!