Comment Axel

Hello!

Interesting blog post. It seems like you are happy with your results, so Im pleased you seem satisfied. I remember playing your game on the different playtests we had and I think your game made good progress from every milestone to the next. I think you speak very briefly though about the parts of your game, and the subject itself, and not so much about your group such as how you worked as a group throughout the project and that part how it has been working out. I think you did a good job with the level design and the overall design of your game. It looked great and I think the game play and your level was good. I got a ”mystery” feel of your game, which I liked.

I hope you are satisfied with the project and the program so far and I wish you best of luck in arcade games!

https://axelgamedesign.blogspot.se/2018/03/post-mortem.html?showComment=1521738755347#c6973848814024298472

Sprint 8 – postmortem

Now this end has finally come to an end, and our game is finished. It has been an interesting project where we have learned a lot, but I think most people are feeling a relief that this course is coming to its end and a hype for the next coming course, Arcade games.

We, in group Jabberwock has been making the game Behemoth, which is a game where you as a player is controlling a huge spaceship that you are to steal from your enemies and transport to your headquarter. The enemies however, will not so easily give it to you and are sending everything they have got to stop you, so you as a player need to fight your wave through waves of incoming enemies and kill them in order to survive. We wanted to give the player the feeling of manouvering a clonky, heavy machine and in the end, I really feel like we managed with our aesthetics and our design of the game. By having all the input on the keyboard, and making the player rotate the cannon and aim with keys on the keyboard rather than the mouse, the player felt limited to their agility and therefore got the feeling that they really was manouvering a machine. We managed to create all the features and assets in our backlog for our game on a good level so we are very happy with the end result of our game.

We have learned a lot from the project, how to in a good way work as a team, but also in our respective minors. My artists have been working with pixel art, which was their first time, so Im sure they have got a lot of new knowledge there. My coders have been coding and making sure everything is bug-free and my designer have designed his first game.

Me personally have been the scrum master for my very first time and lead a project for the first time. I have got a lot of new knowledge of how to lead a group efficiently. I have learned methods that are not as good for the group and also learned other methods that worked well. What I realized is the importance of actually meething up as a group to work together, the communication is so much better and we are all aware of what eachother is doing, so that is the most important knowledge I bring from this project into the next and I will set up a very structured workmethod for my new group where we will meet every day to work together at school and by doing so, we will all be aware of what is going on in the project.

Comment on Anders

Hey!
I liked to read your blogpost, it was quite interesting. Its quite “sad” that you didnt feel like the playtesting was of any value, however, I understand that if you were already aware of your issues, that it might have been preferable to work on those issues instead of having the playtest, or just feel that it was not needed. Maybe you could have made something up with the questions in the survey to make it more important? In our case, we used the survey to ask questions on matters we were in a disagreement about in the team. Questions where half the group wanted something, and the other half wanted something else. We asked the question and then we took our decision based on the feedback we got.

However, I think it is very good that you are reflecting about yourself and can critique your work. That is good for your development in the area and I think you should continiue doing so. I hope things turn around for you in your group with this time that is left so that you can be happy with the ned result and feel that the effort you made this last time atleast had a postive effect on your game and had a good impact.

Good luck with your game.

//Niklas E.

Sprint 7 – Playtesting

So far in the course we have had two ”major” playtestings. The first one behing ahead of the Alpha deadline and the second one being ahead of the Beta deadline.

Playtesting 1:

The first playtesting went quite well I must say. Most playtesters liked what we had so far and we actually had a playable game at that point with many of our assets already implemented. For the Alpha, we didnt focus on music or sound what so ever, so for the first playtesting we had no sound to be tested.

We had for this test-session, two different attacks. One smaller fast laser and one stronger laser the player need to charge up. What we noticed during this playtesting was that many of our testers didnt realize this and therefore did not use the stronger, charged up laser, which was the main issue for the first playtesting, since it was something we really wanted to try out. This is something we worked on for the comming sprints to make it more obvious for the player, and mainly our cannon on the Behemoth has been worked with to make this obvious. Now, we show in a clearer way on the cannon when it charges up the laser.

Playtesting 2:

For the second playtest we had added a lot more to our game compared to the first one. On our second playtest, we had nearly every asset for the game in the game. We were missing an entrance animation for our third enemy but nearly everything we wanted for the final product were in for the Beta. The second playtesting also went good, we had a lot of different playtesters testing our game and most of them liked it and told us we had a finished product which matched our aesthetics, so we were happy with that. We had made some changes in the controls from the first playtesting accordingly to the feedback we got from the first playtesting, so for example, changing the shields was now made on 1-2-3-4 instead of h-j-k-l, to make it less confusing for the player while still having many controls to keep the aesthethic feel of manouvering a heavy machine.

The one thing our playtesters didnt find out about or found hard / confusing to understand was our power-up. Many testers didnt know when they could use the power-up or how to use it so that was kinda dissapointing and is something we have kept working with since the playtesting, to make it more obvious for the player that they have a power-up they can use.

These playtestings have been very valuable for us sine we have gotten really good and valuable feedback from different players. A lot of the feedback we have got have helped us confirm problems that we had in our minds but didnt really know if it was a problem or not, and also helped us with questions and decisions we had to make in the group where half of the group thought one thing and the other group another. Then with help of the feedback from the playtestings that supported one of the sides, we made the decision accordingly. Also, from the observations that we made from the playtestings, we could make the conclusion that a good tutorial would be beneficial for us to teach the player how the game is played and what they can do. So we have lately been working on an intereting tutorial to teach the player what they can do and how its done while letting them play and try them out. All in all, I think that these playtestings have been very valuable for us in the grop and with our development of the game.

Picture of the change of the cannon from early version to late version. The top one being the early alpha version of the cannon and the one under being the current version of the cannon.

Comment Teodor

Hey!

You are describing in a good and detailed way how you have worked with the music and what decisions you have made in the process and why you made them in a clear and detailed way that is easy to understand, so that is good. You describe the background of your game and the ”general idea” of your game so I as a reader get a hum of what game you are making which is good so that I can draw connections with the music you are presenting. I really like the song you made, I think it really fit the theme of your game. I also think it is a good idea to go through as you did with inspiration from successful movies and games to after that make a song to fit your game. I think the way of how you worked and described your work is really good and I think you ended up getting music suitable for the game you are making. So good job!

Sprint 6 – Beta

So this week have been quite a calm week for me as I did not have all to much to work with. Basically, my main focus this week have been on the Beta presentation, and what to present. Since we have come really far with our game and got really good feedback fro, the last playtesting, and since we are basically done with our game, there is some highlights that I want to present and explain during the Beta presentation, so yeah, my main focus this week has been to prepare for the presentation. More towards the work with the group, as I have mentioned in earlier blog posts, I created three different backlogs for our group instead of just having the normal big one. With that said, we still have the normal product backlog, but also in addition, we have three other backlogs, one for alpha, one for beta and one for release. The intension with this is to easier see what assets needs to be done by which milestone. So in addition with the preparence of the Beta presentation, I have been updating the backlogs accordingly and motivated and helped my group members to finish the Beta backlog, so that we know for sure that everything we need for the beta till be there by Monday. I have also helped a bit with the level and game design, but that was just for a day and was no major changes or decisions, basically it was just balancing.

Since we are in such a good place as of now with our game, we also decided to meet up on Friday and discuss briefly for the sprints to come on what we should focus on and if we want to put some time into developing the boss fight for our game since that is one part we are not satisfied with for our game. We were discussing if we wanted to design a new boss enemy or some different attack patterns for the boss fight to make it more interesting. However, in the end we decided not to do this as we felt it could be a risk to plan for something new this late in the project and that we would rather spend these last sprints on polishing and making our already excisting assets even better.

Slide from Beta PP presentation.

Comment Lina

Hey,

Interesting blog post. You describe in a good way how you have used Scrum and also why you find it to be beneficial and working well for you and your group. You tell about the daily stand up and why you like them and how they are working well for your team in a simple and good way, so it is really easy to read and understand whats going on. Im glad the scrum has been working out well for you and your team, in my teams case, we found our backlog to be a bit messy. Therefor, we created three additional backlogs to simplify it a bit. We made a Alpha backlog, Beta backlog and release backlog and then we devided the assets into the respective backlogs, so that all the alpha assets are in the alpha backlog and so on. This way, it was very easy for us to see what needed to be done and what was already done, by only looking at the alpha backlog (in before the alpha milestone of course).

I would have liked to see if there was anything you were not as satisfied with when it comes to scrum? Anything that is not working as well for you or something you or your group dislike?

All in all, a well written and interesting blog post 🙂

Best regards,
Niklas E.

Comment Elias

Hey Elias!

Interesting post, with a lot of ideas and thoughts. It was entertaining to read.

I agree with your statement about the importance of communication. Communication is key for a successful game so I think it is great that you lift this so heavily. I think you tell quite detailed what, how and why your work is done in a good way. However, I don’t see to much of the game itself in the post which might have been interesting to get a short introduction too to get a bit more insight about the project itself. I also wonder, do you still use the scrum in form of the excel sheet? Or did you totally abandon that and went over to hack n’ plan?

Overall, a very interesting blog post with much information about the topic and how you lead the group and make it communicate well and making sure everyone take part of the vital information which is good. Keep the work up and it will be fun to see your final product!

//Niklas E.

Comment Juste

Hey!

Interesting post! I think its really good that you are helping out you’re artists with easier tasks within art. That is super efficient and you save a lot of time. I find this good also because I, the same as you, have previous experience with art so I too help my artists out whenever needed and I find this super efficient for the group so I think you should keep doing that!

I would have liked to know a bit more about what you did as a project manager then just “planned”. I personally have found it quite difficult to find “project management stuff” for 20 hours a week, so for me its good I can help out with the art, but I would have wanted some more details on what you did project management wise.

It seems like you are doing good though, so keep up the work and I look forward to see your game once its complete! 😀

//Niklas E.

Sprint 5 – Scrum

So we have been working with scrum in our group (obviously), and it has been working out very well for us. For most in the group, it is the first time working with Scrum, however, me personally have been working with game design and Scrum before so I felt quite comfortable with Scrum and I felt like I had a good idea of what it was all about and how it worked.

Since I did game design and graphics before, I have done this course before and also worked with Scrum in a simular project before, therefore I felt like it was rather easy going setting our Scrum up. We followed to template from Marcus when setting our scrum up, and broke our game down as much as possible to get all the required assets down into the game. What we also did to simplify for ourselfs and make it easier to ”read” our scrum and our backlog, was to make three additional backlogs. One alpha backlog, one beta backlog and one release backlog. In these three extra backlogs, we added every asset for the respective deadline. So in the alpha backlog, we put all the alpha assets and in the beta backlog we added all the beta assets and in the release backlog we added all the release assets. We also made a new tab in every backlog with ”Done for this stage” where we simply put an ”X” if the asset was done. This way, it is very easy for every member of the group to see what is done for every milestone, and what is still to be done for every milestone in order to be on time with the project.

We feel that scrum has affected our projects development in a good way because every one can so easily see what needs to be done in order for us to actaully have our complete game. It is very easy for every member to see what every one is doing in the sprint planning, what every one actually did in the sprint review and what needs to be done in the backlogs. This is a very good way to just keep the project on track and to not get confused and ”lost” in the project, forgetting something that needs to be done. It is also very good for us because it prevents us from working on the same thing. For example, one artist can see that the other artist is working on the player avatar in the spring planning and therefore wont take that asset but will work on something else the artist see’s needs to be done before the next milestone (beta) in the beta backlog.

Picture from our Alpha backlog in our Scrum.