CoBots Launch Trailer

Today is the release of our game CoBots!!

We made this game last spring as a school project and since it got such great feedback, we decided to release it. We’ve been polishing the game this autumn and now it’s finally available at Desura and on our site!

This is the first game I’ve ever released and none of the graphic students in my group had worked with 3D before, so I’m very proud of us for making it this far. OwO

If you would like to play our game you can buy it for 3.59€ / 4.79$ here:
http://www.cobotsgame.com/

CoBots at Tekniska museet

Today was the grand opening party for the new game exhibition at Tekniska museet in Stockholm. I was there with CoBots and gave people the chance to play our new version of the game. It feelt amazing to have people playing the game that I’ve been developing and for me to be able to stand behind them and watch the reaction. It was almost the same thing at GGC last spring, but this time it was even more people who I had never meet before and too which I had no relation at all.

Except from CoBots, the school also showcased Fly or Die, Tribal Marathon and Luna Love. It was alot of visitors and it was alot of fun to see both young children as well as older audults play our games.

Character design – CoBots

In CoBots the player(s) controls two maintainbots.

In the early development of CoBots, Me and Petra were tasked with designing the bots.

Since there should be two different robots which cooperated throughout the game, but still be able to do exactly the same thing, we didn’t want them to look to different from each other.

Concept sketches by Petra Medin.

We sketched some different concept of the bots and we then compared our ideas and decided on a final concept. We both liked the idea of an antenna on the side of the head and decided how long their bodies should be. We also wanted to make some kind of a pattern on their bodies.

Since the robots are only there as servicebots for the humans, they shouldn’t look to luxury. We decided to make them gray, but add some colored light around them. The shapes of the two robots are flipped versions of the same cone shape. We felt that the shapes could make the players sort the two bots into different genders, which we didn’t want. Therefor we made the cone shape that might have otherwise been read as a more feminism form green and made the other robot purple, since we didn’t find these colors to be stereotypical for specific genders.

Turna-round of Character made by me.

Once we made the meshes for the characters and tried them in the game, we made the light a bit stronger to make it easier for the players to recognize their own bot.

We also recorded voices for the two robots, which you will be able to hear if you ever happens to kill one of the bots in a terrible trap or just happens to play with someone who’s not able to cooperate with you.

Playtesting

We play tested our game on two different groups. Since our prototype cogwheels were made out of cardboard and tape, they didn’t work as well as we had hoped they would. Since the spinning didn’t work properly, the players who tested our game had to make a lot of thinking just to understand the basic concept of spinning the different cogwheels and how this correlates. Once the players understood the system, they thought it was quite interesting and saw potential for it to work, but we really need to improve the cogwheels.

They also said that we should add more flexibility in the movement. This was something we had thought of before, but we had decided that we just wanted to tryout the basic movement system this time; to make sure that it could work. We’ll probably add another component to the game play such as cards, so that the players get the chance to use different tactics.

Optimize meshes

When we started working on CoBots last year, neither me or any of the other two graphic students had any experience working with 3D. We all wanted to learn tough, so we decided to go for a 3D game anyway, since it would fit our idea better.

I have had a lot of fun working with 3D and I have learned much! One of the things that we’ve learned the hard way is to optimize meshes.

When we started making meshes for CoBots, we really wanted to make good looking meshes. We hadn’t worked with 3D more than in our first 3D course earlier that autumn and because of this we didn’t really understand what the outcome would be from making to detailed meshes.

Now that we’ve been reworking the game, I’ve learned. I have. It’s still tricky though. When I open up a beautiful sword mesh that I remember that I worked on and was pretty satisfied with, I don’t really feel the urge to make it less detailed. Since the sword is only a background detail, I do understand that I have to do it, but I really wish that I had knew how to optimize the meshes in the beginning. It would have saved us alot of time and tears.

Second board game meeting

I had another meeting with my board game group today. The earlier idea about a candy store was dumped and instead we tried to come up with a good mechanic to build our game around.

We got stuck at first since we found it quite difficult to come up with a system before the aesthetics. We tried to think of different puzzle games since we wanted to keep it simpel. We decided that we should prioritise to find a core mechanic that feels important and well executed.

After a while I proposed that it would be interesting to use cogwheels in someway. The rest of the group thought that this was a interesting idea and we brainstormed around that. What we came up with was a board on which you were able to place different cogwheels. If two or more cogwheels were placed next to eachother and a player rotated one of the wheels, all of the  cogwheels would rotate. (In the same way that real cogwheels works, wow!!)

Our beautiful first version of the board.

We still have to decide exactly how many cogs each cogwheel should have and how big our board should be. We will meet again tomorrow and try to decide a design that we can use when we have our first playtest this thursday.

The Holder

The main goal in CoBots is to activate different parts of the spaceship and this is accomplished by moving the energy core. To activate the power in a room the players have to use a special core that is found within a holder.

 

When we made the first version of the game for our school project, it was a quite simple design. It worked fine, but afterwards we felt that we could push the design a bit more. 

 

For the updated version of CoBots we’ve been polishing the mesh and have also added an animation. Since picking up the core is a pretty important task in the game we felt that it deserved a bit more work and now that it’s done we feel that it was a big improvement!

Board game concept

Today I had a meeting with my group about the board game that we’ve been tasked to develop. We have to come up with a idea for a board game and then make it from scratch. Other groups will try out our games and give us feedback throughout the process and we’ll also try their games.

We started of by brainstorming for different ideas. We asked ourself what kind of theme we wanted for our game, but we got stuck. Instead we decided that everyone should tell us random words and ideas without over thinking it. We wrote down all the words and after a while we checked the list for interesting themes.

You can see the whole list here.

Some of the words that stuck was

• Brandman (Firefighter)
• Rädda skogen (Save the forest)
• Godis butik (Candy store)

We had also made a system earlier in the course with a game board that had different parts that could rotate. We really liked this system so we thought of maybe using a moveable game board again.

After further brainstorming we had two ideas.

One was a game about pirates traveling to the center of a circular map to grab treasures. They would have to move back and forth since they couldn’t carry to many treasures at a time. This board would be moveable and hopefully add some interesting strategy systems to the game.

The other idea was set in a candy store and the players would steal candy from the store without beeing noticed by the shopkeeper. The candy would be more valuable the further in the player advanced in to the store, but it would also be a higher risk to be noticed by the shopkeeper.

Right now we are more interested in making the second idea and we’ll continue to work on the concept this monday!

Spaceship

For GGC I was tasked with making the mesh for the spaceship that we would use in a cutscene. This was a task that I then finished in a rush, since I had a lot of other things to do. The finished spaceship for the GGC version of CoBots looked more like a boat that a spaceship. It was also so flat that it was really difficult to believe that it was the same spaceship as the one the players had explored earlier.

For our polished version of CoBots, we’ve remade the spaceship design. This time I had more time to actually look at other designs and sketch before making our ship. This was still a bit tricky for me, since I mostly draw characters and not vehicles, but after a while I came up with a sketch.

Since our last spaceship had looked to flat I decided to add some more volume and also connect smaller parts of the ship to the main ship. I decided to keep the big pipes since I think they share the same silly feeling as the different environments onboard the ship and I still want the ship to reflect our game.

While building the ship I made sure to make it in different parts. Since we’ve decided not to use so many textures in CoBots, this is a great way to still be able to add different colors to the objects in Unity.

I hope that this ship will be more suitable for the game and I’m excited to see how it turns out once it’s implemented and gets the right lightning.

Godmorning Sunshine!

So I’ve finaly made a blog!   *Beautiful fanfare playing in the far-off distance*

Rigth now I’m working on polishing of my groups game project from last year. We made a game called CoBots and won two different prizes.

•  Best 1st year project
•  Pwnage award (best game at the conference)

Since we got such great feedback, we’ve decided to publish the game and that’s why we’re still working on it for the moment. For me this work means making more meshes, re-working the design of the characters and recording new sounds.

Check out our website: http://www.cobotsgame.com/