Comment Week 6 (Amanda Cohen)

https://amandacohen58776528.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/blog-post-6-post-mortem/comment-page-1/#comment-14

:

”Hello Amanda!

Your friendly neighborhood programmer peeking in. First off: I want to say, great post. You explained very well why you think that your game turned out great and since I also played your game I would have to agree with you, it was great! I can see why you say that you had great management in your game so that you could focus more on polishing, it made your game very stable and reliable which a notable achievement as a first project.

I do also agree with you that working on a project that motivates you makes a big difference in the end result of the project and it can also be somewhat hard sometimes. But sticking with your project, especially since it’s a school project and you can’t really switch groups when things aren’t working out is probably the best attitude to have. It might even result in feeling increased motivation over time.

I am glad to hear that you had such an efficient workflow and that you are proud of it. I think you really should be proud of the game, it was one of my favorites as well. I do however think that asking yourself “would a professional do this?” before making decisions or speaking up might be very harmful practice. I think that there is a probability that you might never feel like a professional, I sincerely doubt that I will anyway, and I think it’s quite common to feel like you haven’t really reached that goal yet because no one is ever done with improving or changing.

At least, in my opinion, I think that you should always try to surround yourself with people that you can say anything around without having to worry about if they perceive you as being worth being there. Any unspoken thought is a wasted one in group-work, even the stupid ones. They might not be as stupid as you think.

However, I might have completely misunderstood what you meant by that statement and I’m sorry if I made the comment weird.

In conclusion: great game, and good job! Looking forward to seeing what you can make in the future!

//Fredrik Henriksen Lövlie

(frhe6405)”

 

Comment Week 5 (Oscar Vines)

https://oscargamegotlandblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/08-03-2018/comment-page-1/#comment-8

:

”Hello Oscar, Fredrik here.

 

Your post was very interesting, and I can relate to not wanting to reiterate the importance of playtesting as I also talked about it in a previous week. I can also agree that having fresh eyes can really help the improvement of the game. As you mentioned, even if there’s a part of the game that you as the developer think is really cool, in the end It doesn’t mean anything unless the player feels the same, so it’s good that you have a positive outlook on the feedback given.

 

The part about the scrolling background was also very enjoyable and an unconventional solution to the background scrolling that I didn’t think about, it’s also very well explained why that approach was needed for your particular project.

 

I am however confused about your comment about making the level by hand would take too much time, do you mean that you have procedurally generated levels right now, or is it just about the background scrolling?

 

Other than that I think you have made a very good post explaining your design decisions and the reasoning behind them.

 

Keep up the good work, can’t wait to see the game that you guys end up with!

 

//Fredrik Henriksen Lövlie

 

(frhe6405)”

Comment Week 4 (Kaijun Wang)

https://kaijunqilin.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/add-a-new-enemy-type-shooting-enemy/comment-page-1/#comment-8

:

”Hello Kaijun,

Your blog-post was quite interesting as you showcased a lot of different aspects of the latest enemy in your game. Some of these aspects that were interesting to me were for instance, how you spawned the enemy and that you had several different spawn points that were randomized, how you designed the enemy to stop firing after it reached the other side of the player and the reason behind those aspects. In addition to this, I think it was also quite good that you alluded to the fact that the difficult parts of the programming for this particular feature lies within the perfecting it, as the last little effort and polish is what is mostly noticed.

It was however somewhat difficult to follow your train of thought at some points when you were really getting into it. To remedy this in the future I would suggest that you read your text to yourself or even better someone else to see if it flows well.

All in all, interesting blog post and your game looks really cool!

//Fredrik Henriksen Lövlie
(fr6405)”

Comment Week 3 (Natasha Bianca Mangan)

https://programminggamesafunworkload.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/the-effects-of-scrum-on-my-games-development/comment-page-1/#comment-5

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”Wasup Tashie! Fredrik here,

Your post was very interesting and I could really relate the what you said about how it’s easy to get distracted as a programmer and never completely finishing assets. I am however a bit jealous of having an excellent memory to offset that. That would be so nice to have but sadly it’s not the case for poor old me.

I’m not sure that groups normally should have two Project Managers, but that might just have been a typo and it’s not that important overall.

It’s nice to hear that your group has very good chemistry but I would have liked to know in what way the chemistry in your group works well to improve your workflow.

I liked that you went more in depth into what Agile development means for the workflow in your group and even gave an example of how it can make development more flexible. The quote was also very fitting and helped to prove your point.

The comparison between Scrum and waterfall, as well as the reason Scrum is usually picked for game development, was also interesting, especially for people who might not be familiar with the definition for them or the difference between them.

Overall your post was at some points hard to follow, perhaps because of, like your bad programming habit, sometimes you don’t really finish your thought and start writing about something else. Just a slight structuring problem that would make it a tad bit easier to read. Other than that it was very interesting to hear your point of view and I really enjoyed reading it.

Keep up the good work and I’m looking forward to seeing your game develop!

//Fredrik Henriksen Lövlie (frhe6405)”

Comment Week 2 (Kentaro Hayashida)

 

https://ouroboroshamtaro.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/water-like-no-other/

:

”Hey Kentaro!

Fredrik Here,
Very Impressive work. The game looks absolutely astonishing. It looks something that I’d expect from a released title, not from the first game project from school. Very well explained as well, especially how you allow the reader to follow your process as you went through the different iterations and encountered different problems. I also enjoyed the very nice usage of GIFs so the game could be appreciated in its full glory. The thing that matters most is after all how the game looks while running and you supplied a plethora of good GIFs to document how the game improved over time.

I am a little curious about how the things you have implemented affect the overall performance of the game even if the framerate looks baby-smooth from the GIFs shown. The only negative thing I can say is that I would personally have liked more in-game screenshots or GIFs of how the different layers move while in engine.

Overall, very well explained so even a plebeian like myself can understand what you are talking about.

Keep on rocking man, you’re making me jealous!

//Fredrik Henriksen Lövlie (fr6405)”

Spawning Errors

Hello there!

My name is Fredrik Henriksen Lövlie and I am studying Programming and Game Design at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. During our current course (Game Design 2: Game Development) we are required to write weekly blog posts about our design process and the progress of our 2D Shooter project. The game we decided to make is called Beelonging and is designed to evoke the feeling of belonging to a group.

This week I worked on changing the way our enemy spawner worked, this needed to be done because our previous version was random and to make a level design to speak of we had to be able to design the spawning by hand. To make this spawner I decided that I had to design it to be able to choose the time from the start of the game the spawn needed to occur and the location on the Y-axis. The X-axis is not important since all enemies spawn from the right side of the screen and fly towards the left. I also decided that I wanted my spawner to be accessible to anyone that didn’t have coding experience so that the level design could be done by anyone in the group. Finally, I wanted the spawner to be able to spawn swarms of flies since we wanted them to appear in waves.

The way I solved this is by creating a Game Object that’s just off the right side of the screen and within its script I made a class that holds information about the Y-axis, the Game Object that was supposed to spawn and the time that the object in question was supposed to be created. Then I made a list to hold a number of those classes and made that list public. This way anyone with access to the unity editor of the project could decide all of these variables for every object as well as increase the size of the list. The way the spawner was then used to spawn a whole swarm of flies was through making an empty game object and having that object be parent of all the flies in the swarm and placing all of them in relation to the parent in any formation that you’d like and saving that swarm as a prefab to be used by the spawner later.

This is the interface I ended up with

Sadly an issue came to my attention, which was that none of the children of that formation would be updated if the prefab they were based on would be updated. This was a problem since most of the features in our game are designed simultaneously. I solved this issue by making a separate script to create the formations for me based on the position relative to the center of the formation. This way I could even create waves of other enemies or even power-ups which also helped to make the enemy spawner easier to use and less dense to navigate.

In conclusion, this work was important because my job as a programmer is not only to make things work but also to make my work accessible to my peers, not only to the programmers I work with but also with the ones who don’t have experience with coding. This way saves endless hours of pointless work and improves cooperation within the team.