Spark: Big Game Project Post #7

This week has gone primarily towards playtesting the game for the upcoming Gotland Game Conference. We felt we had nailed down everythign essential to the experience and my job was to experiment with different settings including how much health and stamina the player has, how far they can roll and how high they can jump, etc.
The game is meant to be quite difficult but fair, and to reward players for being patient with their strikes and making good use of […]

RIP Synapse, Hello Spark: Big Game Project Post #6

Our previous project, Synapse, has now fallen apart. We felt we could not continue developing it as there was so little about it that worked fundamentally. We where told by the teachers previously that it was a bad idea to pivot the project (reworking it into something else using the biggest amount of assets we had already made) and thus kept going. We finally reached the point where we simply could not go on. The project was doomed, and we […]

Synapse: Big Game Project Post #5

So, the project was pretty much deemed a train wreck. We finally got a chance to show off our game and get people to properly play test it, but the players were unimpressed, not only because we were so far behind on implementing our features, but also because the core mechanic of the game just failed to entertain. We had a chat within the group about trying to start over with a new game, but the idea was ultimately rejected […]

Synapse: Big Game Project Post #4

This week I worked on the logotype for the project and chose a font for us to use in the game. What you see below is the final version.

I started by making six different logotypes, each with a different theme and shape. Three of them depicted a brain in different styles, and the other three had varying styles of neurons. The test logos can be seen below.

Most of them where rejected for being too abstract, generic or not conveying anything […]

Synapse: Big Game Project Post #3

This week I have been sick and as such, I have missed out on a lot of work. With the time I had available to me, I finished the waving animation from the previous post and practiced a bit more tweening from a tutorial. I was supposed to do another animation this week but that was given to another team member in my absence and I have yet to recieve the key frames required for my replacement animation.
That is all […]

Synapse: Big Game Project Post #1 and #2

Week 1:
Note that I joined this project later than the other members and as such was not involved with the initial development of the game.
That said, we had recently started on the our big game project called Synapse. It is meant to be an educational brain-tampering game, or rather a simulator, where you show the player an image of the different regions of the brain and a character linked to it. The player is then allowed to send pulses throughout […]

Space Shooter Project Blog: Post #6

So, I’m back again. This time I had been tasked to animate our cryopod. With very little knowledge of animation, I had to ask a fellow team member who was in charge of most of our animation for advice on the subject. Below is an image of the cryopod as it was before we started working on it.

The animation I was requested to make was a kind of ”frosty smoke” effect that would help identify it as a cryopod. […]

Space Shooter Project Blog: Post #5

For this post I will cover the cryopod asset present of the ship of our game. This will replace the beds I created previously, as they simply didn’t fit thematically nor with the narrative I myself wrote for the game. Go figure. Either way, this is the process of the cryopod creation.

Since I knew one of our cinematic images had portrayed a cryopod as displayed in the picture above, I figured this was as good a place to start […]

Space Shooter Project Blog: Post #4

I’m back again, with more props for the game. As a level designer without any levels to make, I have been relocated to creating props for our levels instead. This time, I will show of my two first props this week, the fire extinguisher and the beds, which can be seen below.
 
These props are both relatively simple in design. The extinguisher was the first prop I made, and I will now cover the design process.

I started by […]

Space Shooter Project Blog: Post #3

It’s once again time to shed light on the work I’v done this week. Since I finished the design for the first level last week, I have now been assigned to work on the decorations for the level. In this post I will cover the first two props I made and  some of the thoughts that went into them.

These are the props; a barrel and a container, seen from above. The first one I made was the barrel, […]

Space Shooter Project Blog: Post #2

Alright, another week has passed and additional pieces of the levels have been created. This time I will cover the next section of the game. Being the dedicated level designer, I don’t really do much outside of building the levels. Anyway, moving on.

So, here comes the part where I feel I have to repeat some of the information from my previous post, as whoever you might be that is going to read this blogpost, might not feel like looking […]

Space Shooter Project Blog: Post #1

So, the construction of our space shooter is now on its fourth week. Initially the group I was working with, team 14, was split and I along with two of my team members were reassigned to team 5. In this group we decided to take the space shooter concept of another group, namely the ”Last Signal” concept. To quickly summarize, the concept was about the player taking the role of a scientist on a space ship that became infested with […]