Astral Shift

Today was a really, really slow day. We got a lot of critique from our teachers at the sprint review, mainly regarding our progress in the project and in our planning. They would have liked to have seen more art assets and placeholders inside the game at this point, sadly though, we had a lot of sickness throughout our group last week, which resulted in us lagging a bit behind schedule. We will just have to make up for lost time this week!  I mostly spent the day on playtesting and stresstesting our version of the game on the PS4. It turned out to be a very hard task, since that version of the game just crashes for some reason. One of our programmers will have to continue with troubleshooting this problem tomorrow, or we might not be able to have a game to show for the beta presentation on Friday. // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer at Les Variables.

Today we concluded week 5! Come the afternoon we all had a productive discussion about our plan for next week about the sprint review on Monday, but also about the beta presentation next Friday. The programmers mainly dealt with a lot of bugs and managed to make the game fully playable on the PS4 at the end of the day. The artists also provided us with a mockup level that we could use to stress test the PS4 to make sure that it could handle a full level without any dropped frames. This turned out to be of no concern. Me and my co-designer spent the most of the day structuring up and updating the asset breakdown. I worked on updating everything in the asset breakdown to match what we had done, while he worked on the plan for next week. We still have many problems to resolve, but a bunch of the most pressing ones were solved today. That is all I had to share for now! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer of Les Variables

We got another visit from our sound designers today, who brought us some new sounds they had been working on, as well as a new sound bank for us to try out. I also had a brief meeting with them where we discussed a bit about the project in general and what they had been working on. Afterwards they got to play some of our new levels and provided some feedback about their experience with it. It was a lot of talking for me today where I spent most of the time allowing people to playtest our game and listening to feedback. Tomorrow, we will start preparing for our sprint review that will have on Monday. That is it for today, thank you for reading! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer of Les Variables

We once again had a lot of sick people today but we have somehow managed to stay positive and push through the hardships we face. We had our weekly catch-up meeting today were we discussed worries and issues we have to deal with as a team. It turned out to be a very valuable discussion with simple and clear solutions in sight. We are all still a bit weary about how things will turn out, but whatever the case, it will turn out to be a spactacular game, even if we do not have time to add everything we planned to add. I spent most of the time on level design and ended up with some of the hardest puzzles the game has seen so far. I even got very positive feedback from a playtester that had tried the game out once before. This could very well be the basis of the last level in the entire game. Even though we have been a bit unlucky with a lot of us being sick, we seem to be in a good spot right now, even though our priorities need to change a bit. There is no reason to worry just yet, ...

Today was another slow day with a lot of our people being sick. One of our programmers have had some trouble with getting the particle emitter to work on the PS4 and decided to put it briefly on hold and change the focus to implementing spritesheets instead. He also managed to resolve some minor bugs in the code that made playtesting a lot easier. I spent most of the day tweaking  (especially the camera) and general playtesting of the game in all of the versions and also invited some new people to playtest it and give feedback, with focus on the dynamic camera, feedback and movement. The rest of the time I spent on level design. That is all for today! Until next time! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer of Les Variables

Today was another slow day with a bunch of us being gone due to sickness. There was a few positive things happening today, though.We found out that a solution for our sound problem was to downgrade to an older version of fmod and I also got help with my Tengine license. I spent most of the day playtesting and greyboxing ideas for new levels, but also did some minor work with updating the asset breakdown. That is all for now! Take care! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer for Les Variables

Today was a slow day. I spent the most of the day structuring up our asset breakdown in order to make it presentable for Monday's sprint review. Our programmers spent a lot of time today at figuring out a bug that only affected the game on one of our three ps4 kits. After long hours of confusion and troubleshooting, we found out what the problem was. Two of the kits had an older version of SDK installed, which made them incompatible with our sound managing software, called Fmod. We will have to get our kits upgraded before we can test the game out on our other two units. If not, we will not be able to have any sound in our games. It was a pretty heavy blow for many of us in the group, especially since we are also a bit behind schedule. I hope this can be resolved quickly starting Monday. Take care! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer of Les Variables

Today was a day of doing! Our programmers implemented a bunch of new stuff for us to use that are invaluable for playing the game! The two versions (Tengine and Unity) are now almost identical. I spent the whole day on updating the GDD and will now take a break from working on it until it is needed again. In the meanwhile, my co-designer focused on getting the tutorial level done, so we can show it off on Monday on the sprint review. We had once again a visit from our sound designers, whom we had a meeting with, mainly discussing the future plan of sound and music in the project. They now have seats beside us which will allow them to work along side us whenever they so choose. We only need to fix internet for them and they will be good to go. That was about it! See you next time! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer

Today I had other personal business to attend to in the morning, and did not arrive until the afternoon. That is not to say that we did not manage to get a lot of stuff done today however. On the contrary, today was one of the most important day for us designers. The reason for that is that we spent the whole afternoon syncing  our two versions of the game in order to use them both for playtesting. The Unity version of the game will be used to test the early concept levels, while the Tengine version will be used to test the final ones. This means that we don't have to implement our levels fully before we playtest them, which would most likely have added hours upon hours of work for all of us in the long run. Because of today, we have completely avoided this problem, with the only cost being the entirety of one afternoon. Which I think we can live with. Tomorrow, there will hopefully be a lot of level building and playtesting, but I also know that the GDD needs a lot more work...

Today I worked a lot with documentation again and spent a lot of time writing in the GDD. I also discussed a lot with the lead programmer and my co-designer regarding the implementation of a certain mechanic that will aid the player and make the game less frustrating to play at times. Our programmers started working on a level manager and a script in Maya that will help our workflow immensely, in theory anyway. Tomorrow, we designers will try to sync our prototype version of the game with the actual PS4 version and make sure that they behave identically. That is it for today! Thank you for reading! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer

Another week, another day working on the project. We mostly got positive critique from today's sprint review. The teachers thought that we had gotten far with the game and that our planning was decent. They did give us some suggestions of improving our asset breakdown, which we will have to change until next week, however. We also made a promise on having at least one new level presentable on the PS4 in time fore the next sprint review. I spent the day before noon updating the asset breakdown for having it ready for the sprint, while I spent the remainder on the day updating the GDD on the afternoon. There is still a lot of documentation that needs to get included before the end of the week, so I will probably need tomorrow as well to continue working on it, which might take the whole day. I feel that we are in a good spot right now and that we all are especially good at communicating with one another. If we keep this up, we might end up with the best game we have ever worked...

Today we had our first official presentation of our game that has just entered its alpha stage. Our game was well received by our teachers who commended us on the progress we had made with it. They gave us a lot of valuable feedback and suggestions on improvement, but was ultimately pleased with what we had come up with. Our team had a meeting in the afternoon regarding our plan starting on Monday and had a group discussion of improvements to the game. The meeting went on a bit over an hour and we felt that the essential had been brought up. Programmers spent the rest of the time today resolving some leftover bugs while artists made everything ready to start production on Monday. While my co-designer looked into a feedback issue, I worked a bit on the asset breakdown while discussing technical solutions with my co-designer and programmers. This day went by incredibly fast! We all will now take a well-deserved break over the weekend! See you Monday! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead D...

Today was a very stressful day with lots to do in before the presentation tomorrow. Our biggest problem of the day was figuring out how to make our game presentable on the testkit without using internet. We asked around, but in the end no one could help us out with it. We will simply have to make due with the version we have on the computer. The day was mostly spent on preparing for the presentation tomorrow, with a lot of playtesting, tweaking and rehearsing. I did most of the playtesting and tweaking while my co-designer worked on the presentation. Some pictures from the day: The game is now fully presentable and is ready for being presented! See us then! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer

Our programmers successfully implemented all of the core mechanics in the game today, which means we are able to start playtest it on PS4 tomorrow! This also means that we will hopefully have a gameplay loop to show for the alpha presentation this Friday. We will have to start planning on what to show on that day tomorrow. If all goes well, we'll be able to present with the PS4 version of the game. I mostly sat with the asset breakdown, but also managed to do some playtesting and level design. We also allowed a few outsiders try our game out and provide feedback on gameplay and game feel. Tomorrow we will playtest the and tweak the Tengine/PS4 version of the game, start working on the presentation and structure up a week-by-week plan for us designers. That is all for today! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer