It’s over. Our ten-week march is over and we have a game. Or, at least, something that constitutes as a game? I am being super harsh here. Do we have a game with a start and an end? Yes. Can you finish the game? You could if you are very good from the start. So, ok, we have a game. Could it have been better? By a lot. Yay! We have a bit of undercooked game. Not bad for a bunch of first timers-ish.

For those of you who have no idea about what is going on – this post is an aftermath of a group of first-year students creating a game together for ten weeks. This week we have presented our game to other students and got to see what they have.

So, let’s see what went good and bad in our production process.

The good stuff

The narrative and the establishing of the theme and mood: In my opinion, this was by far our most important effort. The fact that we went out of our way to think about the world in which the game was taking place in details was very important. The concept we received was too alien, too unfamiliar. The time we put in explaining the motivation of the avatar and showing the world she lives in was a solid decision. Have we actually succeeded in that? Who knows… But most of the games I played during our release/playtesting day were lacking in that department. The games were either established in a known world and for that reason skipping the explanation of it. Or they were not explaining their non-mundane setting.

The art: when I mention the art, I don’t mean the individual skill of our artists. It would be unfair to say that the art of an established artist is good while the art of a beginner artist is not that good. This isn’t the point. The point is the ability of our artists to create the ideas we had for the visuals of our game and syncing their styles in a way that made them fit each other. This is what I mean by the art being good – the effort and work the artists put into aspects like cooperation and style synchronisation.

The not-so-good stuff

Agile Scrum: we sucked at it. No delicate way to put this. We were awful at planning properly what and when we should be making. We were awful at keeping track of each other’s work. We were awful at keeping deadlines. I personally feel that this system, in the way we were shown and asked to do it through a template, was too unfocused. It was too much of a relic from previous education. Too specific in some unimportant aspects while being completely unhelpful in other important things. If it wasn’t a required element for the course completion, I would have disregarded it completely. The main purpose of it, from what I could gather, was to teach us about time management and to know our own time frames. And there is a grain of sense to that. But predicting time frames never works as you hope it would. So, we attempted to predict something that is famous for being horribly unpredictable.

Playtesting: this one is my personal responsibility and I  must say that I failed it. I could say that there were other factors to this, but my fault is not voicing my concerns early on. This resulted in playtesting reflecting a Waterfall method rather than Agile. Stuff piled up and waited for a fix instead of getting fixed on the go.

Overconfidence: we were too full of ourselves and it exploded into our faces. Never wait until the final days to implement something. Any implementation creates a side product of bugs. Implementation of a bunch of stuff last minute creates a legion of bugs. Those bugs riot and take your programmer as a hostage and demand to cut things for the release. An ugly scenario. I hope I will never have to relive this situation again.

All of this was a valuable experience. The experience of creating and building a game. The experience of the dynamics of a development team. It was both fun and not fun, satisfying and disappointing. And most importantly this was just a school project, no better place and time to fail and learn from our mistakes.

Art by Niki Kubasova.

And here is a doodle of my team Hippocampus. Thanks for the time we spent together and the best of luck to you all! =)

For this week’s post, I’d like to write about my design of the boss arena, the interior and the end of our game.

For those of you who didn’t read my previous posts, where I think I mention the general ideas behind our game: my team is designing a game that will consist of the only level. Basicly, we try to deliver the whole narrative in one experience. Because of that, we need to finish our story after ending the only level of the game. This calls for more detailed planning of how the area where you fight the boss does look like.

Here is a sketch I made to show my team the thinking behind the boss encounter environment. This sketch will be later used by the artists to create the arena of the boss fight and to explain to the programmer the behavior of the boss and the reasons behind my ideas (for example hitting the wall or the egg’s spawn).

So, we have a circular arena on the top a crystal tree. The visualization of this is tricky since we are technically inside the tree, but let us ignore laws of physics and space. In this room, I placed the throne that is the final destination of the avatar. Then I tried to show that we will cover the throne with props. The throne is going to be revealed after the boss dies by destroying props. All of this connects to the scene that player sees in the beginning of the game where the avatar leaves an old, depleted thrones behind in another tree.

With this we show the player the begging of our story, it’s progression via player’s play and, finally, how the story ends and resolves.

I find that having a miniture story shot ’em up game that contains a closed story cycle is an interesting idea. It’s so easy to create a story but only manage to introduce the player to the first chapter due to the production time limit. When you are a student it’s easy to overscope.

Please note this is one of my older artifacts, not something that was done directly this week 🙂

For more information on my game, please visit my first diary post, where I describe in more details the game we are working on.

For this week’s blog post I would like to discuss the incorporation of the same visual element in different places to intensify the aesthetic side of the game.

So, according to the narrative that we try to create, energy is everything in our game world. All living creatures consist of the same energy: the trees, the avatar, the enemies. This was the main reason for us to make the health of the avatar its ammunition. And it was during this week that I suggested using the same sprite for pick-ups and projectiles. Also, for something else, which we might not get to in the production process.

So here is a sketch of how I imagined this. To the left, we have a sketch of an energy flux players can get from smashing crystals while playing. And in the middle, I tried to sketch a projectile that would use the same sprite as the base. We will have to make it more projectile-like, but I hope you get the idea. The last picture is more narrative heavy and has to do with the ending for our little game. You can read details on the sketch itself. It again incorporates the energy flux sprite. What is the point of all of this? To enhance the filling, that everything in this world consists of the same matter.

Another theoretical step towards improving the aesthetic experience of the player is to make the avatars glow as she has more or less energy and when she picks more energy drops. I hope, that these elements will tie together nicely into a visual feast that I so desperately want our game to become.

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 can reconstruct the concept from those ideas into something that is now in fact your creation. And that is what we did in my team; we took a wide, unclear world and reinvented it our own way. This allowed us to create a clear narrative for our game, which I think a lot of presentations lacked, as they followed the concept documents without much remaking. So why am telling this? Because I want to show you two sketches of our game menu. The reason for why there are two of them depends on how much of the rest of the game we can produce. And both menus have some narrative value.

Menu sketch number 1

In this one I tried to depict the crystal tree and its surroundings to give the player a better feeling of the world. It shows the structure of the tree and environment that is both beautiful and desolate. This is the menu I want for our game if we have time to make several art pictures that also introduce the player to our main character and the beginning of her journey. But this is a time-consuming process that is heavy on the artists and I am not all too sure they can manage this in time. So, we also need plan B for the menu.

Menu sketch number 2

In this one I wanted to have our avatar shown to the player as an introduction. The avatar is always facing away from the player in the game and that can make it hard for players to connect with her, especially since it’s a half-spider and arachnophobia is a real thing. So, if we can’t make scenes where we show the story of Betulla then we need, at least, to show the player her human side, how she gently touches the crystal, that she isn’t a monster you might think she is.

There is however a huge flaw in this approach – we leave the menu screen as the last thing for artists to make. If we can’t manage the story and must make a menu that shows Betulla, that is still a big chunk of work for the artists as this picture requires a lot of details on artistic level for it to connect with the player.

Our project is a shoot ‘em up game. The theme of game revolves around a world of stone “trees” that have a structure of a geode; stone on the outside and a crystal hollow core. All of the creatures of the world live inside of these “trees”. And the energy of the world is in the crystals. In this game the avatar Betulla, a mix of a spider and a humanoid, climbs the inside of the tree trunk in search of places that are concentrations of energy.

The sketch you see on the screen is my attempt to show my team how a health bar in our game can look like. Disregarding the awful visuals of it, as I am not an artist, there is actually a lot of thought put into this. Let’s go thought different elements and my thinking:

-The positioning: The edges of our screen (as seen in the drawing) are filled with the edge of the tree trunk. So, if we place the player’s feedback outside of the tree it will shrink our playing space even more. It makes more sense to place health bar at the bottom, especially since the avatar can’t walk back down the tree in our design.

-Player feedback: In our game, we decided to make the health of the avatar the ammunition. This let us to the concept of “energy is everything”. You consist of this energy, you use this energy as the weapon. This would require a very dynamic meter that can fast reflect the change in the resource. This type of bar is easy to use as both a health meter and ammo meter. However, there is still space to place a numeric value for people who prefer a solid information instead of abstract symbolism.

-Aesthetics: I can poorly capture the aesthetical possibilities of this sketch, but I can try to explain what I wanted to show. To me, it is important for the health bar to be associated with our avatar. I tried to do that through turning the left side of the bar into a resemblance of a spider leg. This is the lowest life point, it is narrow, this makes me feel the accent of how little health you have. The right side in my drawing has a “cap” that can make connection to the avatar even stronger, like an object belonging to the avatar or the shape of her hairdo. I also want our health bar to reflect the contrast between the crystal containing life energy and the crystal that is empty.