Advanced Game design II – First Game

The theme for the first week games were “Every finger in the room is pointing at you” and we were asked to make a game based on this theme.  We had 20 hours/person for this assignment.

The game we made in my group was a board game inspired by the classic mix & match games, where you have different parts of characters and you try to match them together to create a complete character.

My thoughts about this theme was that either the people are pointing at you because you want them to or because you are different/bullied. So for our game we decided to go for both of these. We made a game about beauty surgery where the players try to get an operation for each part of their body first, while stopping the other players from finishing their operations.

The players start with 7 cards each and deal these cards between each other. The players try to collect cards of the same type and if they have three of the same at the turns end they can try to make an operation for that body part.

The player with 3 of the same bodycard then roll a dice to see how succesful the operation was. (1-2 = 1 point, 3-4 = 2 points, 5-6 = 3 points) If the player has collected a “Perfect operation card”, this will add 1 point to the result, unless the player haven’t already reched the maximum result (3 points). Other players, that have collected a “failed operation card” may use this on another player and this will instead reduce the result by 1 point. If the player roll 1 point and another player used this, the operation truly is failed and the player recives no bodypart.

(Cards made by Simon Öqvist)

The finished version of the body, once a player have all of the body parts including: large lips, big breasts, shiny blond hair, six pack, looong legs and strong arms. Finishing the game with an absurd looking creature.)

Once any of the players have operated all their body parts the game ends and the player with the most succesful body winns.

It was a interesting concept to work with, but if we had had more time, I would have added more different bodyparts. So that the points weren’t only a number, but visible on the different parts. Som if a player had a 1 point leg operation or 3 point leg operation, it would be visible on the body chart.

Alumni and future plans

Hi there!

It has been some moths since I last wrote here, so I figured it was time for an update.

Right now I’m taking a Game Design course where we are asked to make a game in one or two weeks depending on the assignment. We are divided in random groups, without any rules other then that there is 3 or 4 students in each group. This means that you might end up in a group with only graphical students or programmers. You might also end up working with people you haven’t worked with before and that you wouldn’t have choosen to work with if you were the one to decide the groups.

This course is great since we both learn to work quickly and also get to learn how to work with different kinds of groups. We have been divided in to random groups in previous courses too, but since this is our last year, it feels important to challenge ourselfs and also, this is our last chance to get to know eachother before we split up.

Each game in this course have different themes to it. I will make one post for each game soon, so that I can have the posts more focused on that.

(The guest lectures)

This week we had our Alumni days, meaning that we have different guest lectures, most of them held by former students that are now working in the gaming industry. We had great lectures with people from Blizzard, Might and Delight, A Sweet Studio and NETENT. We also had a mingle party tonight where we were able to discuss the industry, favorite games, future plans, but also our feelings about tv-shows, movies and other nerdy things. It was a great evening and me and my classmates reflected on how different it feelt to talk with industry people in our last year compared to our first. Tonight we actually feelt like we were their equals and fully realized that we actually might work among them soon.

Mechropolis Trailer

Here is the trailer for our new game, Mechropolis!

Explore a long gone civilization and fuse together the only inhabitants left, the robots, to solve puzzles and make your way through the cave!

I think Kenth made a great job with the trailer and it really captures the feeling of our game.

Particle effects

One week left until Gotland Game Conference! Since I had finished my assigned work, but we still needed particle effects, I took the responsibility to fix that. These are the effects I needed to do:

• Attack projectile
• Attack trail
• Attack when hitting target
• Robots when being Stunned
• Stun Idle for Robots
• Robots when being Fused
• Steam for the environment
• Dust cloud for environment

This is the first time that I have ever worked with particle effects and it was a bit tricky to get the hang of it. I have made all the effects above, but I am not sure if I like the result. The Steam turned out quite nice, but it was really hard to find tutorials and such for how to make other effects in Unity. I guess the effects I have made will work for the conference, but I wish I had had more time to really understand how to work with it or that some of the programmers would have had more time to explain it for me. They have a lot to do on their own though, so it is not their fault.

I am still happy that I was able to learn something new! Always such a pleasing feeling.

Will have a trailer soon and I will be sure to share it with you once it is finished! The game looks really good now and I hope we will be able to offer some really interesting gameplay experience too at GGC!

Finishing the board game

We ordered some new cogwheels for our board game which we received last week. These cogwheels were made out of plastic and worked great with our design.

Once we had tried the game with these new cogs, I took the responsibility to fix the cards and rotation arrows that we should paste to the cogwheels. I finished them on monday night and we were able to put the whole game together at Thuseday morning.

We made the board out of a plank and some spikes and wrote the coordinations on the sides.

We then showed our game to Adam and played it together with him. He really liked our game and we didn’t receive any negative feedback, so we were very happy with the final result.

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.

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.