Major takeaways from PixelPop Festival: 1.) Game development community in St. Louis is friendly, reliable, huge, and inclusive. 2.) Its rapidly growing with strong independent developers from all over the country. 3.) Its a hidden gem of passionate people with some awesome upcoming games. Overall this weekend was fantastic and it was so fun uncovering what … Continue reading PixelPop 2017
Hey everyone, Sam here to tell you about a recent public showcase we had for Gaze. This public showcase largely served as the last big playtest for the game. Being a capstone game, this showcase pretty much marks the end of major game development for the game (at least in the academic sense). While we … Continue reading Public Showcase Debrief
An important, but often overlooked element in game production is designing and creating an ending. The reasons endings oftentimes feel underdeveloped or badly written is because endings (for the most part) are given the least amount of production time. After all, why spend time crafting the ending of the game when most players quit playing … Continue reading How to design the end?
Hey everyone, Sam here to talk to you about our core puzzle mechanics in the game. Of the many elements of the game, the puzzles have been one of the elements that has been constantly revised (whether it was drastic overhauls with different types of puzzles or with minor tweaks to playability). Initially, we had … Continue reading Core Puzzle Mechanics
Hey everyone, Sam here to tell you about how we are designing the intro (at least the non-interactive aspect) of our game. One of the problems with a designing only a small fraction of your game (be it a simple prototype or a vertical slice) is in choosing what information to convey to the player … Continue reading Designing the Intro
Hey everyone, Sam here to tell you a little bit about the lore of our game. One of the problems that emerged while working on this type of game was the need for some sort of basic lore in the game, as there were elements in our game that seemed out of place and did … Continue reading Laying out the Lore
Hey guys, Sam here to go over the most recent showcase that occurred at DePaul. Last week was spring break, and with that comes the half way point of development for our games. Therefore, a showcase was held at DePaul in order for teams to show off the games they were working on. It largely … Continue reading DePaul Midyear Showcase
Hey everyone, Sam here to tell everyone about our recent visit that we had at the Chicago branch of Wargaming. For those unfamiliar with the studio, Wargaming is the company in charge of the popular World of Tanks series. They have studios across the world and the studio we visited, the Chicago branch, is primarily … Continue reading Wargaming.net Studio Visit
Hey everyone, Sam back again to tell you about the progress we made with our current build. We recently did a quick playtest in our capstone class and got a bunch of great feedback. For this iteration of the game, we wanted to test how successful we were at guiding the player to their objective … Continue reading Playtest Session #4
Hey everyone! Sam here to tell you guys and gals about the latest additions to the game as well as discuss our findings from the latest playtest. The biggest additions to the game is the rough first pass at implemented art. As you can tell from the above picture, we have made great strides in … Continue reading Playtest Session #3
Hey! Sam here to talk to you about how we are designing the level for our vertical slice. As you can see above, we are dividing the demo into two major parts: the observatory and then the other half of the map is devoted to the main 5 puzzles of the game. The observatory serves … Continue reading Laying out the level
Last Tuesday was our first big playtest to test the validity of our mechanics and to get players' opinions on the art style we are trying to implement. As you can probably tell from the screenshot I took, the game is very bare bones in terms of art, but this initial test was mostly used … Continue reading Playtest #1
Hello again! Tiffany here. This week, we went through making a lot of changes to our designs and concepts for the ship game we are making. An idea everyone liked was some type of catamaran, and we came up with a collaborative sketch of what we all think might make a good model for our … Continue reading Bringing concepts to life…
Hey everyone, welcome to Team Phoenix! We are working on a battleship type game set in a bio-luminescent world, so our art direction for this game is going to be very interesting and a lot of fun. To start, we have been gathering references of cool settings with vivid colors - mostly oranges, blues, greens, … Continue reading Getting to work on art
After multiple brainstorming sessions, a global game jam detour, and a pitch presentation, we have begun working intensively on our game, which is known as "Gaze". Gaze is based on one of the top pitches we had when we started brainstorming and was originally called "Ethereal Cruise". Inspired heavily by Greek mythology and constellations, Gaze … Continue reading En”gaze”!
During a class session, we decided to collaborate with each other's teams. Since we both have a general understanding of what we want to create, we decided to add a twist in the design process. The twist was designing each other's games. The two teams that partook in this was Chimera and Phoenix. Since the … Continue reading Designing Eachother
Based off of the faculty and class feedback on our three ideas, we started playing games that similar to a vision we had. This was based on the idea of Ethereal Cruise, where a spirit explores the world and brings the stars back together. This was envisioned to have players learn and take away stories … Continue reading Finding the Tone
In class, our team presented our top 3 ideas for our senior Capstone. This was in class at DePaul University where peers would give feedback on how they view the project. The first was Water World (Squort), where the player is an aquatic animal with the ability to swim through any terrain.There they find themselves head … Continue reading Picking a Game Idea
We've started developing an artillery game where you play as a forward observer, more to come on our main page but here are some gifs for now!!
Team Phoenix is now officially up and running! Weekly blog posts to come!
