GGC Aftermath - Thoughts about the Project

The GGC is over and now is the time to write the project report. The report will be turned in Monday on May 30, and seminars will take place on  June 3 and 10. I will be writing about my animation work for our previous game project, Synapse.

Several months before the Big Game Project course began, I was very nervous about my performance on it, since I haven't read much graphics courses during my second year. Luckily, I found a talanted team where I had an important role during the development of Synapse, when I was an animator drawing in-between frames for the in-game animations, until I ended up as the team's main sound designer for Spark.

I thought both of my roles have been really fun to work with, especially with the animations when the end result turned out really good. There I learned a lot about how to move proportions and draw lines in a good way, where I maked sure that my frames were in the same art style as the original key-frames and breakdown frames. My sound work was also really good, though I made a lot of revisions. I learned how to use two new sound softwares which will be put to good use in future projects.

This course has been a personal victory for me. Because this is the first time that I've put up a game at the Gotland Game Conference exhibition, since my previous Theme Park project was a huge mess and wasn't allowed to be presented at the exhibition. It was so nice to see students, teachers, GGC jury members, and kids playing our game. We got a lot of positive feedback from them, such as the graphics, animations, the combat, and comparing the game to Dark Souls. They also highlighting some apparent bugs and places in the game were they get trapped and can't get out of.

Overall, I think that our huge pivot was absolutely the right choice. We worked day and night in order to finish develop the new game, and it really paid off. Instead of doing a game which we were uncertain would even work, we made a fun combat platformer on a short scheme, thanks to our previous experiences on building platformer games. I'm sure that if we would've solved the design problems with Synapse, as well as maintaining a smoother workflow (especially for the animations), then Synapse would have been a game too.

But for now, Synapse may rest in peace. Long Live Spark!

Here are some pictures from the exhibition. The first two pictures shows testplayers of Spark, next to the game Slumber.

 See you around!