Project 2: Electric Boolagoo

I lied, the game is called "Song of the Bardbarians".

Also, welcome back! I have taken a break from blogging during the break between the past project "Dino Jump" and "Song of the Bardbarians". Now I am back in full combat-blog-posting gear.

So, "Song of the Bardbarians" is an isometric hack n slash game where you play as a barbarian who is armed with an ax that is also... an ax. Ax both as in ax as well as guitar.

Yes, the game is intended to be covered in puns and wordplay. I'm not sure if it will include dad jokes as well, but I will keep you updated.

We have a much larger group of students for this project and have split into different work groups in order to manage the various tasks as efficiently as possible. I'm sure it will change over time, but for now I'm the feature owner of the level design. I haven't actually done much of level design yet though, since many other aspects of the game need to be nailed down first.

For this week, I've been part of discussions, discussions and more discussions. What I and the rest of my designers have been doing this first week is working on what the game will actually consist of more specifically. In a sense, we have been aiming to nail down the technicalities and details. It's not done yet, but we have made some solid progress.

I have, together with two other designers, worked on the level design and we have decided that the game will follow a linear path, but with branching paths that will meet up again at vital points. This way I as a designer will have more control over the gameplay experience, but the player will also have their freedom of choice regarding which path they take towards the goal. Each of these paths will offer their own challenges, so that the gameplay will not feel monotome and grindy.

I sat down in Unity and created the building blocks we designers will need when doing the block-out of the different areas of the game. These building blocks will at a later point be turned into something way more beautiful by our fantastic 3D artists.

The result of my work in Unity turned into what you see above. Unity has two tools that I used while doing this: Probuilder and Progrids. Probuilder is basically a tool that lets you modify vertices, edges and faces of a 3D model while Progrids allows you to modify the grid as well as change how objects can snap to said grid.

Thanks to these two tools I could create very basic and yet precise objects and their sizes can be easily translated to the assets that artists creates in Maya. Also, being able to snap objects on a grid will allow us level designers to create the actual levels later on that all follow the same layout instructions.

Besides working with the level, I have also done extensive work on the protagonist and how they will behave in the game. This work has consisted of discussing with the lead designer (basically asking him two thousand questions about the player character) and one other designer who also worked with crafting the protagonist.

To make sure that the protagonist's behavior was easily understood by everyone in the group, I created this flow chart of the protagonist's behavior (see image below).

I also have to admit that I made this partially for myself as well. Even though I was one of the people who created the current behavior of the protagonist, it was easier to actually understand how it all worked by doing this flow chart. Writing long sentences about it can sometimes just sound like nonsense, so you re-write again and again. By looking at this flow chart I know exactly how the player charater will behave and reading the text on top of that can expand upon that.

Over all, it has been a really fun, but a little confusing week. Sometimes I was completely sure what I was working with, but at other times I wasn't sure what kind of of game it was turning into. I'm sure that is common during the early stages of development and now at the end of the week, my mind is no longer unease.

Once again, welcome back to my little writing corner! Stay tuned for the next update! Perhaps there will even be a dad joke somewhere in it, who knows.