Step Counter

Making the step counter was easy in the sense of that there are many various sources of documentations and blog posts of people receiving help in these kinds of problems. Our game went through so many changes that in the end it became a type of activity app with a Tamagotchi experience tied to it. The activity part was necessary in our opinion because we wanted to set our game apart from the many apps that was similar to the […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.3: my two cents on the topic of design.

In part 3.2 I tried to explain the role the game designer. But it is also true that while some of us are always game designers, while some of us are occasionally game designers, all of us are just designers at all times (in game development). If the sense of design is just the ability to recognize and create a pattern (my interpretation) then this is a common human trait and even more so in people who are artists. By […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.2: But aren’t we all game designers? Yes and no, most of the time – no.

Here it comes, the most interesting part of my monologue. The question of who are the game designers to me and why most of us, students, aren’t game designers when we are working in a group. As I have already pointed out, game designers as a title were avoided like the plague in the descriptions of the courses. Furthermore, all branches are called Game Design. Yet the role of a game designer is a specific role in the group.
So, are […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.1: Why did game designers get robbed of their title?

1-milestone. Part 3.1: Why were the game designers robbed of their title?
Finally, the part of this blog that I looked forward to most. And while I thought to start this part of discussing the game designers a bit differently, the fates decided otherwise.  Someone might have mentioned this in our designer class discussions, but I have no memory of this. Perhaps I will make a fool out of myself, but I feel that this is an important observation which needs […]

hello world, again

So I’ve yet again remade this website. This time I’ve moved from jekyll to hugo, because I’ve had to reinstall ruby far too many times and there’s always some issue with it preventing me from just getting it up and running so I can update this site. Hugo is just a binary, no need to install anything to get it to run. It’s far less of a hassle.
If you for whatever reason want to see the old posts (which were […]

hello world, again

So I’ve yet again remade this website. This time I’ve moved from jekyll to hugo, because I’ve had to reinstall ruby far too many times and there’s always some issue with it preventing me from just getting it up and running so I can update this site. Hugo is just a binary, no need to install anything to get it to run. It’s far less of a hassle.
If you for whatever reason want to see the old posts (which were […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.5: After the project ends.

This is a small post with only a couple of thoughts that I had a hard time placing anywhere else specifically. I decided to just make a separate post for them because I associate them with the end of a production cycle. If there are things that you get to experience or notice when you ended a project, then please share!
 
Over-burn and the price you pay. There are many talented individuals who do other things besides studying game development. And […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.4 Imposter syndrome or an imposter?

You probably have heard of a saying “Fake it till you make it”. This saying is about something called Imposter Syndrome.
Here is a wiki link for a quick reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
I also remember this expression sticking with me after a certain TED talk, so go check it out too, if you haven’t seen it:
https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are
If you are too lazy to deal with any of this, then here is the bottom line – when you deliver what is expected of you, […]

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 […]

Designing our Critter

At the time of writing this, CritterFlux has already been presented at the Gotland Game Conference and we received a lot of praise over our character design and artstyle. Our critter was apparently rather adorable! Although I would argue that the animations and movements of the little creature also added to the overall cuteness-factor. So was the successfull appearance of our critter a fluke, or did we actually put some thought into all of this? You be the judge as […]