Hello everybody!

This is Per-Emil coming back with another ramble about things and thoughts! We’ve been busy here with the project trying to put all the major pieces together while balancing illness, snow and merge conflicts.
Once someone gets ill here at the office it spreads around and we’ve been taking turns at staying home. Not being able to work will certainly affect any project in some way or another but it’s important to not have the whole team coming to a halt just because someone is away.

When planning our schedule I try to make sure the project is sectioned up into parts where we can allocate resources to where they are most needed at that moment. If this means for example that we can not finish a feature because it relies on systems that is on hold then we should be focusing on content creation. If there’s a hiccup with the asset creation pipeline then we switch focus and tries to focus on finishing smaller features such as non-critical AI behaviour or general bug tracking.

So many things to do!

Any game consists of combinations of sensory experiences. Game creators blend audio and graphics together to create artful expressions, exploration or problem solving to appease our sense of accomplishment, blended with a dash of storytelling to create and maintain an emotional connection or a sense of purpose. All this parts makes up hundreds of thousands small details and there is always something more or different to work on - and remembering this is the best way to keep busy in all situations!

Test often and casually!

This Friday we’re holding an “open house” tour of our school to show what we do here to possible future students and we will take this opportunity to do a quantitative playtest where we A/B-test different mechanics and input systems that we’ve not really been able to decide what is the “best way” to do it. When we disagree on what “the best way” to do anything is we bring in non-members to the discussion. This is an effective way to move beyond our own blind spots. Often when you work on something for a long time you tend to get so caught up in certain details or features that you miss out on bigger things that are obvious to others.

What I have worked on recently is setting up the basic UI and making it feel like an immersive part of the game. No one enjoys clunky menus that has been pasted on top of a game like some sort of last minute fix or afterthought, so I thought I would put some time into it early on. By putting the menu inside a “diegetic” scene that is part of the same environment the game is played I made it possible for myself to simultaneously work on VFX-details such as shaders, light movement, colours and creating a nice playful tone within the underwater setting.

That’s all for me this time around but I’ll be back shortly with more updates on the visual effects I’ve created, the way I like to structure my work and our somewhat unconventional way of using sourcetree with github.

// Per-Emil