This page introduces the game’s I’ve been developing with pictures, videos and download links.
Alcheringa
(Jan-Mars 2009, 10 weeks)
Developed for university’s Game Project 1. The game is about two players co-operating on a scrolling field by creating, moving and using clouds to make plants grow. The players can only move himself in one direction and moving the clouds in the other, so to move the clouds around freely they have to work together. The game got nominated for Best Innovation in the Swedish Game Awards 2009.
One player heats the water, both players move it to a dried plant, and the second cool the cloud to score. Preferably before the plant scrolls out of the picture.
My role in this project was, for the first half of the project, lead designer while on the second half being project lead, which turned out to be a lesson on how not to do things. The first half was being lead designer on paper only, as all questions were directed to the guy writing the design draft. The second half of being project lead was not so much about following and adjusting a plan as much as calling latecomers, prioritize work and hoping everything would work in the end. And it did. But I’d say I did quite a bad job (what can I say, I’m self-critical), but I’ve learned a lot from that and (hopefully) won’t make the same mistakes again.
Filhäv
(April 2009, two days)
This game was created during a Game Jam at the university called “Spelsylt” (“sylt” being the fruit-filled mixture called “jam”). From the key words Time and “Fil” (translation later on) I and two other design students were supposed to make a competitive game in 2 days (the school had to close during the night, thus adding an extra day). The Swedish word “Fil” can mean both “Sour Cream” and “lane”, or being interpreted as the english “feel”, so after some discussion we build on “sour cream”, although I’d say we managed to get “lane” in, as well.
The background, if you have to ask, is a reply to the organizers adding the key-word "Easter" during day-two, *after* I've spend the whole first day making berries. The text thus say "Now we've got Easter you pricks! :P" accompanied by a crudely-drawn Easter egg and just-as-crudely drawn Easter twigs and feathers
The game is about binge drinking (“häva”) sour cream (“fil”). But. In this sour cream are berries that you do not want to fall down into your throat (it makes you cough and lose several seconds of sour cream binge drinking). The berries fall from the package down in lanes, so to avoid them from reaching your mouth, you press the lane’s button to make it turn into a berry fairy. You have to press the lane which berry is closest, though, or an “emo-fairy” will appear, giving you a score penalty. By using the up and down keys, you can increase and reduce the package’s distance, giving you more points but less time to react to the berries. A video might explain it better, so here goes:
(note: I took some time in May 2010 to polish it a bit further, but I’ll leave the old version up to be honest about what got made in two days)
My role in this project was, apart from brain storming and fleshing out the idea with my two co-designers, to draw all the art for the game as well as put the two pieces developed the first day into a working game. The art was drawn by hand, then scanned and – in the berries and fairies cases – coloured with “colour replacement tool” in photoshop. And of the spelsylt competition? We won. For the “unique style” and “dynamic difficulty adapting to both casual and hard core players” among other nice things. A fun anecdote was that none of us knew Game Maker that well before we started the project and learned it as we went. Another fun anecdote is that we were all first-grade design students, yet our graphics and sound got a mention in the nomination as well as turning the game in on time with relative few bugs.
Monkeys at War
(January 2010, two days)
As a part of GSP Game Jam (GSP is for “Gothia Science Park”, an incubator close to the university), which in turn was a part of the Global Game Jam 2010, I, Henrik Lundqvist, Niklas Johansson and Jonas Bjering made a game around the theme “deception”. The result was a chess-inspired game where two monkey tribes fight for supremacy over an island. The playing field is an 8*8 grid and it has pieces to move, but that’s about where the similarities end. You see, the game is 1) Simultaneous and 2) Played with imperfect information. Each round you can move with one monkey and attack with another (read: not do both with the same). Then both the players’ moves are played out. There are four monkeys: The banana monkey put banana peels (mines) on it’s position or a position 1 square away (that is, a 3*3 grid centered at the monkey), invisible to the opponent and blows up on a crossing opponent for 6 damage. The “stick monkey” nudges a monkey (I think with a knock-back) horizontally or vertically for 5. The “apple monkey” tosses an apple along a row or column until it hits an opponent for 4 damage. The “berserker monkey”, finally, attacks someone in melee-range for 10 damage. Note that all monkeys start out with 10 health points. The game is over when there’s only one monkey left on either side, which then looses the game (it dragged on forever until we implemented that).
- The game in its initial play state
Download Monkeys at War (requires Java and Flash to play)
As with the earlier “spelsylt”, my role in this was just as much painting graphics in Illustrator as doing design. We quickly set up a lo-fi prototype (read: “pen-and-paper”) with pieces of paper for the pieces and writing down our orders on other papers. This allowed us to balance the game long before we had it working on the computer, and paint all the graphics as well. The last day was to get the game running and bug-fix it (note: This downloadable is crawling with bugs. There is a more stable, although still bug-filled, but so far it’s on a few USB memories).
Amongst four teams on the GSP Game Jam, ours managed to win, much thanks to making the theme “deception” into a verb in the game rather than some attached afterthought.
Wheelchair Racer
(Apr-Jun 2010, 10 weeks)
This was developed as part of the uni course “Project in Game Development B”. That is, the sequel-project to Game Project 1, which was really called “Project in Game Development A”. But nobody really cared. Anyway, it’s a fairly conventional kart-game, except that you play with wheelchairs instead of go-karts. Which may sound trivial, but posed a lot of challanges during development and changes the way you control the game in it’s very foundations. You see, we wanted the chair to be steered like a wheelchair would, so you drag each wheel by tapping the corresponding trigger. Initially, this meant you stopped tapping the left button to turn left and vice versa, but this double-negation got confusing to the testers, so we swapped it. The initial concept also had power-ups which power would scale with power-crates along the track and had “tails” which would last really, really long and make racers behind go faster while they remained in the track (in that way creating a natural handicap-system). Both these features caused many design discussions to flesh out, but had to be cut due to programmmer-trouble with the engine.
Here’s a video:
Sadly, as you can see, there’s a lot of things that doesn’t work – the UI takes too much attention, no animations are in place, the music doesn’t connect to the level (that’s the menu music, perhaps that excuses it?) and the level is flat (and the trailer-maker picked a non-transparent logo for the vid) – even after we had to let it go. The programmers had some major headaches with forcing the vehicle forward in the way we designers wanted, and the animations didn’t get implemented (at least, by the time the video was made). Our problems with UDK also means the download file is gigantic (I seriously wonder if I should upload it at all). Still, I defend the programmers – it’s people I’ve got all the respect for and I believe is competent. They simply picked the wrong engine for this game and we designers probably wished too much out of too little time.
So, my role in this was that of Lead Designer. Initially born from an idea of mine to make a game controlled by a wheelchair-bound avatar, it turned all self-parody party party. It was great fun to work with, but the turn from a serious “salute the handicapped” to “it’s all fun and games” was a bit of a let-down, especially since the idea came from my personal background. Although I’m not very proud of the fun-factor of the game, I’m taking a lot of other lessons with me. Such as it’s not fun at all to slice features off the game, and you should really add layers on top of a good core game play instead of peeling layers from a slightly-too-complex game and that the difficulty of innovation resides in motivating the team the innovation is better than the convention, keeping the morale up to implement it during bad times and still execute the idea well rather than coming with the idea in the first place.
