Subconscious design

Two systems
The concept of two system that handle how we work as human beings keeps popping up in different research. Lieberman in his book “human learning and memory”¹ talks about different journals³ and research that brings up two systems of learning. That we automatically learn things in some situations and in other situations we seem to have more control over what and how we learn.
Other research on two systems is more oriented towards behavior science. David Kahneman is a noble […]

Keeping Assets Consistent Throughout Production

Author: Hanna Hagenmalm
Team: Leviathan
Concept: Draxl’s Journey
So. You have been tasked with drawing a spaceship. As you have never drawn a spaceship before, this turns out to be quite a challenge. But as the art style is graphic and your team supportive, you do manage to create a first little shiplet. It took many hours, and the standard bucket of sweat and tears and blood, but you did it. Good job.
Then you have to create a second one, and while the […]

#2 The Silent Hero

When times are hard and there is a lot to do you sometimes find a light in the tunnel in the form of a silent hero. Like Sam helpt Frodo in the lord of the rings a friend or colleague sometimes jumps in to carry you through the storm. Whether family members pulling through for you during hard times or friends comforting you through a though part of your life. I don’t know what we would do without our silent […]

Enemy Animation

Hey this is me again. This post is a continuation of my enemy design post. In this one I’ll talk about my process of animating my design.
My enemy is an insect, so obviously I needed to do some research to understand how six legged creatures works. During my search I didn’t find much material about it but an article describing how it should look like caught my attention. It stated than the all the legs on one side move almost at […]

CoC Development Diary #2

Hi there.
Welcome to another development diary of the game Crown of Creation.
Our main focus for this week was implementing and polishing all the assets we currently have and show the game on alpha presentation and play testing. The alpha presentation went pretty well I would say.
Personally my job for the week is making the powerpoint for the presentation and implementing sound to our game, and try to fix the boss behavior if possible.
So implementing the sounds was not as simple […]

Making a Light Plant

This week I started work on a new enemy, and a new mechanic for the game. This enemy is a flower that will sit on a wall and shoot projectiles that provide light, but are also dangerous to the player. The projectiles will also be used later in different puzzles that will interact with them in different ways, opening pathways or providing more light.
The plants themselves will also interact in different ways with other projectiles and the player, but these […]

5sd064 Thomas Härdin Designing Powerups

Thomas Härdin, lead design for Fenrir back again.
We are making progress with the game concept Bullet Hack. A lot of the core is finished, such as movement, shooting, win/lose conditions, etc. Today i will explain recent progress and future plans for powerups. Note that following is based in the mode that is the hacking gameplay.
Lets start at the first powerup. We had some early ideas as a group about different kinds of powerups, for example a multi shot projectile, sweeping […]

Blog Number 2

Earlier in the week I went looking for sound online. I found a site with some license free music, however it gave individuals the option of purchasing tracks. I attempted to read the terms of use, as they had something about student use, but because I could not properly understand the text. I plan to go back to the Terms of Use on the page to see if they give students some sort of slack, however I doubt it. I […]

Game Production Diary 2

This week all the groups presented their alpha builds. It was an exhausting experience to sit through around 20 presentations. But, thankfully, I didn’t leave that torture chamber without some insight about our own game.
in Game Design, you are always warned about how you will probably never get to build your own concept. But when a concept isn’t perfect, it allows you to pull at one loose string and unravel the whole thing into a lose pile of idea. You […]

Improving with scrum

I feel like I have more control over the scrum schedule and the whole product backlog and sprint plan now. I have learned how to use the program and how it works, how to think when writing things down. At the start when I created an example schedule only to show our scrum master it lacked alot of things. It contained maybe 10 tasks and I thought that was enough, as I had never seen a game scrum document before. […]

Power overwhelming

This week we did some major playtesting and got some feedback on the game. Apparently the floaty movement was the feature the majority of people who played our game had a problem with. Some people got understandably annoyed at not being able to shoot in any direction. After this feedback it was clear that we needed to make some changes to the game. We still wanted to keep the floaty movement, since it really captured the way we felt that […]

Teleportation

This week we worked a lot on polishing the things we already had implemented for our alpha presentation. That means I have not really worked a lot on a singular artefact but tweaked and improved upon things that we had done.
During the playtest session that we had earlier during the week we got some feedback on the teleportation. In the version that everyone tested the teleport had almost no cooldown and could be spammed to avoid all obstacles which removed […]