Comment on Blog Post #6

Hi Natali! Sorry for the late comment!
I played your game on the final playtesting, and I really enjoyed it. I agree that you really hit it out of the park with the artstyle! I really think it fits the theme of the game, and it sounds like that is in no small part thanks to the great system you had for working together. It seemed like, even though you didn’t work physically together, that you really had some good teamwork going. I’m also impressed that you managed to get a bossfight into the game, something that our group sadly did it, and it just like you said – we started working on it too late and didn’t have time to implement it. Knowing to start early on that is some really good foresight.
I like that you added both negatives of creating the game, and positives – and that the negatives also have possible solutions added to them. It’s also fun to see that you feel you have become better at working in photoshop, something I felt myself when I made the game.

All in all, I really liked your game – and the art looks really good too. This is also a quality blog post, in my opinion. I hope you put as much energy in your next project, and I hope you have a good time doing it.

Good luck!

(Comment on: https://nataliarvidsson.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/theyre-not-dead-they-just-lay-down-and-rest-forever/comment-page-1/#comment-20)

Comment on Blog Post #5

Hello! Sorry for the late reply.

I enjoyed reading through your blog post, and I think you really bring up some good points. Especially the one about filtering out whichever comments you deem ”good” and whichever comments you think are ”bad”. Not all changes that are proposed to you would actually be beneficial to your game, in some cases it won’t work with the rest of the gameplay. It would have been interesting if you had added some data from the playtesting you conducted, to see what kind of feedback you got in the end. I do like that you added some things that you got feedback on which were changed in a later build, however. It is always interesting to read what changes other groups need to make, to learn from those mistakes.
From what I saw, the game turned out great – and lots of luck to you in further endeavours.

Good job!

(Comment on: https://mattiasborgqvist.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/lycanthrope-playtesting-reflection/comment-page-1/#comment-8)

Postmortem on Behemoth

After many weeks of working together with my group, our game is finally finished and has been sent in to the teachers for grading. It was a fun project, but as the we started pushing into the last two weeks I started getting impatient and wanted it to be finished as fast as possible.

Most people who played it said they enjoyed it, although it had some quite glaring issues. There were a lot of assets I really wanted to make, but didn’t have time to – but in the end I feel that our group did the best out of the situation we had found ourselves in.

 

We planned our game with two graphical students in mind, and after week #3 this proved to be an issue larger than we had initially anticipated. Our second artist felt unmotivated, and had quite a lot of trouble actually managing to finish tasks. Granted, I also were late for my first couple of weeks – but after I had caught up I felt more confident and could more easily finish my assets on time. After a couple of weeks of our second artist pretty much not getting any work done at all, she quit the program. This meant that all of the work that she hadn’t, and wouldn’t be able to finish in the future would instead be left to me to finish – including all the enemies of the game.

 

 

 

I did my best to finish the enemies, most of which you can see here on the blog – and I’m mostly happy with the results – even though I would’ve wanted them to be more detailed and more animated. The biggest reason I could spend

 

as much time I did on them, in fact, were because of our Game Designer, Eira – who graciously took on the task of making the intro-scene and the UI. This left me with enough time to finish up all the enemies, and other animations that needed to be added to the game.

Art-wise, I have pretty much ranted enough about the things I would’ve liked to change. I would have wanted to make the animations more advanced, as of now they are mostly effects such as fire and smoke – and I would also have wanted to make some of the earlier sprites better so that they fit in with the rest in a nicer way. I would also have wanted to make a more advanced background, although I’m not sure how I could’ve made one as detailed as the one I have now without spending a ridiculous amount of time on it.

 

 

As for gameplay, I would have wanted a boss and some more over-all polish. I would also have resized some enemies to make them more visible and easier to target.

In general though, I feel that developing this first game has been very beneficial in terms of making myself better at creating assets that will finally be put into a game. I achieved a better understanding of photoshop, now being able to create animations and more advanced painting in the program. I also had to quickly learn and adapt to the time it takes to create each individual assets, time management probably being my biggest weakness during the project – making myself work overtime during the last hours of each sprint.

In the end, it turned out well for our group – despite our issues, and I now feel ready to start the next project.

Thanks for reading!

 

Player Feedback

So, playtesting.

I worked as a playtester for a while on a game company called ”Zoink!” who made the recently released game ”Fe” – and because of this I fully realize the importance of feedback from anyone who is not directly involved in the project. Being able to swallow your pride, take and process critique is something that any game developer will inevitably have to learn. Being a graphics-student, however, leaves me with less criticism than I might have wanted. Usually, most of the complaints we get are about functions in the game that might not work as intended, or things like balance that needs smoothing out. Even artists usually avoid saying stuff about the art, immediately noticing things like the cannon being too slow, or the enemies taking too many hits to kill.
I suppose it is my fault as well for not specifically asking for feedback on the sprites, but I wish more graphics-students would concentrate on that aspect when they playtest the game.

Should the sprites be bigger? Less detailed? More? Does the line-art look consistent, and does everything fit together colour-wise? Do you enjoy how gray/brown it is, or would you have enjoyed more splashes of colour?

It wasn’t after the second playtest that I noticed I was getting too little critique, so I will have to ask for it specifically in the future. Maybe people are hesitant to point out flaws in art assets because they know it would take a long time to rectify, or maybe they are because there are more glaring issues with the game as a whole. I’ll try to be more specific in my inquiries with the playtesting for the arcade project coming up shortly.

This was a short blog post, as I don’t have that much to say about the playtesting – as I did not get much feedback that was aimed directly at my specific areas. We did however listen a lot from player complaining about balance issues, control issues and general flaws that were aimed at the overall game design. The game has improved drastically mechanically since we had our last playtest, and has improved even more significantly if compared with how it was initially. No matter the issues we have had in our group, loosing a programmer early on, and then a graphical artist halfway through the project, I feel that the project is turning out alright.

Thanks to whoever reads this for taking the time to do so, and I hope your project is turning out well!

Comment on Blog Post #4

Hey!

Sorry for the late reply!
I really like the effect you’ve achieved with the animation, the wind-up was a really good choice and I think it conveys a lot of weight and power. I enjoyed reading your post – unlike my own, it was quite short, which is fine. I think I would have wanted some more technicalities on how exactly you made it, like if you used photoshop and if you used framer or video animation. I also really like that you kept telegraphing the attacks in mind as you made it, it really helps gameplay, and I wish more people would take it in consideration! As a side-note, the image you linked to show the previous animation does not work for me, and gives an error. It would have been interesting to see to understand the process you went through to create the sprite.

All in all, a good blog post. Good luck with the rest of your project! 😀

(on https://isakmansen.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/lightning-laser-breath-attack-thingy/comment-page-1/#comment-10)

Animations, Sprites and my consequent thoughts thereon

So, for the last couple of weeks I have been making sprites – mostly. I am not particularly good at – and I do not particularly enjoy, making animations. Nonetheless, it’s a task that needs to be done, and I am one of two people who is doing it. Well, I was – until our second artist suddenly quit the course last week, leaving me with some more sprites to finished than I bargained for. It’s fine though, I’m lucky to have some team members who are willing to take on extra tasks to ease my workload somewhat. For example, our game designer took over making the UI for example, which I’m happy about. She is an incredibly talented artist herself, even though she is not studying graphics currently, so I’m relieved knowing that it will be handled well.

However, even though I’m not easily stressed out, I find myself a bit worried that I won’t be able to finish everything I wanted to in time for our game to be completed. This means I have to scale back on the planned animations, to make it a bit more manageable for me to get all the finished sprites into the game in time. To do this, I have reused parts of animations, and focused on getting an overall good looking sprite, even though it is not moving much! Overall, I’m quite happy with most of the results so far, but I still have many more sprites to make, and I suspect that the last couple of sprites will be completed close to ”release”.

For example, I made this animation:

It is a simple animation of the Behemoth’s main attack – the missiles that later explodes to damage a clump of enemies.

I was pretty happy with it, but I really wanted to make it rotate – but due to having to move on to making different sprites and not spend too much on one single animation, I had to leave that idea behind. It’s probably for the best, as it is going to be quite small – and I’d prefer to spend some time on things that people will actually see and notice.

Such as the explosions! The game has a lot of explosions, but even so I don’t have time to make as many explosions as I wanted. I really wanted the death animation for each sprite to look unique and varied – but due to the artstyle (that I admittedly picked) it would take too long to make advanced animations for each and every enemy. Maybe in the future, on another project!

This means, however, that there will be a lot of explosions in the game, and they will all have the same animation, albeit in different sizes. I want to make at least one more explosion animation, but if I would make it as many frames as the one I already made, it is going to take quite a lot of hours for me. For now, this one has to suffice. Here it is, if anyone’s curious:

I’m quite happy with it, but if I would’ve had more time to do it I would have made it more impactful, changing the timing and such of the various frames. It’s definitely usable in its current state however, so my time was better spent elsewhere.

So, around this time I knew that I would have to make more sprites than I had initially planned – which means I wouldn’t have as much time to spend on each individual animation and sprite. I decided to put slightly more effort in making the actual images of the sprites look better, and not spend too much time on animations, as it takes me too damn long to make them, and I am much faster at drawing and painting. I think I can get away with this too, because most of our enemies and such are objects and not monsters/characters – which means they can look quite static without it being too much of a hit on aesthetics.

I drew our shooter enemy, for example, with quite a lot of detail – which would make it a pain to animate, but since I need to make many more sprites for the game, I hadn’t planned on animating it much anyway. The only real downside is it being so small, so a lot of the effort I spent in the details won’t show up in the game. Oh well, live and learn.

Here it is, by the way:

Observant readers may notice I re-used the animation for the flames on the missiles. Could I have made new more interesting flames for the shooter? Yes. Would it have been worth the effort? Probably not. Could I stop answering my own rhetorical questions? Okay.

So, there you have it. I wish I had more time to make more advanced animations, I’m not really that happy with the level of animation I have so far. I wish I had the foresight to not pick such a detailed artstyle when I started the project. I wish I wasn’t so slow at making animations, it is quite the bother. I prefer still images, sue me. All in all though, it has been quite fun so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing how much I have learned from my stupid mistakes once we move on to the next project. Hindsight is 20/20 after all, and I would definitely have made different choices if I got to redo this project. Stuff I still need to finish include, but are not limited to: The shield (and all its animations), the background (including parallax layers such as clouds and birds), (maybe) a boss, a death animation for our main character, and in general I would like more explosions to not have the same one for all the explosions in game.

For funsies, I’ll add the first animation I made for the project, so that anyone who reads this can see that – even if you’re a bit unhappy with the things you put in the game, you are here to learn, and as long as you have improved, you have succeeded.

Yeah. The newer assets are definitely better.

Comment on Blog Post #1

Hey duder!

Good blog! Very descriptive. I like how you explain what you were going for when doing the animation of your character, it’s helpful to know – seeing how I have a hard time animating myself. One thing you could think about though is adding more pictures! I didn’t in my blog post either, and looking at other people’s blog posts makes it apparent that it’s more informative if you do!
It would be a more interesting blog post if you also showed the progress from start to finish, and if you added the coloured version. Is this all the animation you’re going to do for this sprite, or do you have more things to finish? I would also have liked to see the sketch for the thing you drew, but that might be a bit of a nit-pick.
Good going though, I look forward to seeing the finished product!

(sorry for the late reply, totally forgot that you were supposed to leave comments to these `:D)

(on https://fallberggraphics.wordpress.com/2018/02/07/blog-1/)

Comment on Blog Post #2

Hey!
Good blog, dude. I really found it interesting to gain some insight, as a graphical student, into the programming process – and I really appreciate the detail you went into, without using too much programming-jargon that I wouldn’t likely understand! It helps me in understanding how I can make things easier for my own programmer in the future.
If I had to pick on something, though – it’s that I would like to see more ways in which us graphical students could help you programmers, and vice versa. I understand that maybe it’s not written for that purpose, but it would be helpful to say the least. Do with that what you will. I always found it hard, as an artist, to know in which way you are supposed to do certain things, like if there’s a specific order to sprite-sheets and things like that.

In general, though – a good blog post, and an interesting read.
(sorry for the (very) late comment, by the way. I completely forgot I had to do this `:} )

(on https://rasagameengine.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/enemy-spawners-and-prefabs/)

Comment on Blog Post #3

Hey duder.
Good blog post, although not much to comment on. I find it interesting how your group also chose to communicate via Discord like our group, and not via slack or some other channel. We also have some of our daily stand-ups on discord, and our project manager has to remind us to update it as well. Seeing how you feel your Sprint-Reviews and Sprint-Plannings are effective, I would be hesitant to recommend having it via voice-chat on Discord like our group. To me, our sprint-reviews and sprint-plannings never seemed effective until we started doing that. I’m also happy to hear we aren’t the only team who suffers from delays because of sickness, or people not being present in general. I hope you manage to figure it out though, as our group started working much more efficiently once we stopped trying to meet up every day in person.
Anyway, I don’t have much negative points to give you about your blog post. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the tasks and such, and how you deal with being a Game Design(Design) student in a project that the actual game designers might not have as much to do as, say, the programmers or the graphics students.

Anyway, keep up the good work! Good read!

https://joakimmalmstrom.wordpress.com/2018/02/21/design-blog-3/

Thoughts on Scrum, and the troubles of individuals meeting up in person.

So, this will be a short one.

I don’t really have all too much to say about the SCRUM process, somewhat because I don’t really understand all parts of it as well as I could, and parts because we don’t really do it in the traditional way in our group.

We had our daily stand-ups in person the first week, but afterwards we figured that to avoid the hassle of having to book a room in the library to do them in for such a short amount of time, in a week where we had little to no lectures together, we would have them on the voice-chat/chat service Discord – where most of our communication occurs anyway. I really looked forward to this, personally. And for the first couple of days it went well, everyone reported on their progress and hardships each day, and things went according to plan – if a bit delayed, which appears customary for our group. It’s fine though, almost everyone in our group is bad at doing stuff on time, and it’s mostly to ensure good quality, so I don’t mind too much, personally.
By the, I think, third week – however, things started going slightly awry. Some people would forget to report on their progress that day, which led to some frustration with our project manager. As he’s calm a cucumber, most of the time, I figured that I at least had to do it properly, for him to at least retain his sanity somewhat. I begun being more descriptive, posting progress images and the like, and it seemed like it eased some of the stress of the entire group.

We also had one of our sprint reviews/planning via Discord, and except for someone sleeping in a bit longer than desired, it went very well – better than the ones we had in-person, in fact. Well, at least in my opinion.

Usually, most members of our group are quite reclusive. We enjoy working on our individual tasks, well, individually. I do, as well. I don’t mind meeting up and doing it on-site, but if I could choose, I would choose the comfort of my own living-space. It works well for me, most of the time – but you also have to consider the other parts of the group. If me being there to support the team is something that is desired, I will of course do that happily. However, it does seem like most of our teammates likes working on their own.

Despite some quite hefty delays in the first two weeks of our develpement, I feel that most of our team has settled into their respective roles now – and hopefully will catch up with the tasks in the backlog that needs to be completed.

I will try to push for some more occasions to check up on our general progress with the game, however – as I would like more input in the actual gameplay of the game, together with our programmer. The last week was quite satisfactory, though – at least work-wise, and I hope we’ll have something good to show in time for the beta.

In general, SCRUM helped our group to visualise what assets were complete, and which ones that are not. It also made us more aware of eachother’s workload – which makes it easier to balance the things you do so that you can help the programmer out and vise versa. Even though we didn’t stick to the daily standup structure of meetings, I found that the way you add items to your backlog etc had a positive effect on our project.

Thanks for reading!

Felix Rahm