Blog feedback #4

Link to Ander’s blog post with my comment: https://andersdotgames.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/1-love-to-all-party-members/
My comment:
Hi, Anders,
Interesting blog post you have here. I do not fully recognize all of your references; however, your main topic is clear and easy to follow.
Now, you say that you encouraged informality early during the project, which I personally think is important as well. As you say, everyone wants to feel comfortable around each other, this is true because it will motivate the team members to come to meetings and collaborate. We […]

Second playtesting – pre Beta

Hi!
In my previous blog, I was writing about a sprint between Alpha presentation and pre-Beta playtesting, and how we decided to freeze some features, and what was implemented and improved during it.
And then came the playtest prior to Beta. It was Monday, the 26th of February this year.  The teams occupied the tables and set up their games. I had a feeling, that this time it was much more relaxed than the first time. Probably, because of more experience of the groups and […]

Reflection on Game design blog, by Karl Lindkvist

sasadzigurski
4 mars, 2018 kl. 18:16

Hey Karl,
I have to say that this blog was one truly interesting, fluid article; easy to read and follow. It introduced me to some basics of level designing (interesting correlation with the music composing).
I like the slow introduction/tutorial way of teaching the player basics of mechanics and controls; rather than writing them on a paper or having them in written form on the screen, which then has to be memorised mostly […]

Week #4 – Cross-border Management

This week I have had the misfortune of having to leave Gotland and head to London on personal business for a number of days. The timing could have been better, to put it mildly. We are currently in the final sprint before the Beta milestone, an important week for the entire group. Leading up to my departure I have been worried that losing the Producer in this stage of the project is quite risky for the team’s communication, and thus […]

Level Design

Recently I have been working on level design. The idea we have behind building a level with everything in a predetermined place, is to make sure we can engineer the experience the player will receive from our game. We want the player to find the game mysterious, feel like they are looking for something unnatural and scary. The way we can do that is to scale down the challenge in terms of enemies. If we have enemies there, we can […]

Blog Post #4 Background music

!Link to sound clip at the end!
Welcome back once again to my blog, today I will tell you about my design process with the background music as the lead sound designer of team Cockatrice.
Take a moment and picture yourself in this situation. You are out at sea on a chilly night, it’s hard to anything and it’s critical that you are able to navigate through these waters to get home. The wind is in your face, you’re shivering from the […]

4th post – pressure before the Beta presentation

Beta presentation is coming up next week. By then we have to be finished with core features, movement, attacks, UI, and challenges. It is a tough week and we have felt quite a lot of pressure recently. Things does not always go as we want them to go. The harsh winter weather caused problems, because many people got sick, and so did some members in our team. We had some delays and it seems that we are running out of […]

Dev Blog #4 -The Unseen Work of a Producer

Hello again!
This is the last week before the beta deadline for the first year students’ upcoming Shoot ’em Up games, so I thought this was a good time to talk about the unseen work of the production. By unseen work I mean things that don’t produce tangible results the same way art and code does.
As a producer of a small team I need to wear many hats, but the majority of the work I do can’t be seen or measured, […]

Group dynamics and high performing teams

With the arcade project just around the corner, people are starting to form their own groups ahead of it. It is clear that the people who have ambitions and the motivation to create something great are seeking each other out. Many of the other  project managers have already managed to form teams of highly skilled individuals.
At first it was also my intention to try to create such a group. However, I ended up not doing so. I am still one […]

Presenting the Alpha

Okay, making a game is one thing, but presenting it to a potential publisher (or just fellow students!), making a great first impression, showing all the cool stuff, gently manoeuvring around what has not been polished yet and keeping it all very succinct is very different. And it usually is very difficult to accomplish. That being said, I enjoyed making the Alpha Presentation of Fear is in me very much despite the fact it wasn’t nearly as significant as trying […]

Creating sounds

During the last week, I have been creating sounds for the game. It has been an interesting challenge for me, since I have never been editing sounds before. Moa Bruus (Lead Sound and Artist), has been very busy with numerous artifacts conserning art. Therefore, I have been helping out by editing audio files.

To know what kind of audio we needed to implement in the game, the group had a discussion about what sounds we wanted to add. During this discussion, […]

Letters

Hello and welcome to another one of my blog posts! Today I will write about an art task once more.
This week I have taken some art assets to work on. One of them is the main menu of our game. To be more precise I have been designing the game’s title – Aetherial, and also choosing font and color for main menu words (like “Start the hunt”, “Exit”, etc. – See picture 1)
I have always liked working with letters, or […]