This week
Ruben finished drawing different civilian characters, Alex cleaned them and Simon found sounds for them. Ruben started working on some of the interactive objects, more exactly a water tower that the players can tip over.
Jonatan finished the animations for the stone character and started on the wood-character.
The programmers continued working on the powers for the characters, the menu and we now have enemies spawning and attacking.
Esteban and I made a powerpoint and he held a presentation for Troels, who is responsible for our course. Like before, we didn't get much criticism on our game, more on how to present it. Both Ruben and I were sick this week and Esteban was away, so a lot of work time was lost while waiting for answers from others.

So,we just got our new office today and even if the wireless died today, we are happy to have our own space.
Here are some animations that Jonathan just finished:Ruben got an OK from Esteban, and here's the general. He doesn't actually fight himself, he just comes in, point at the players and send in his armies.

Our lead programmer is back! He added two enemies to the game today, hopefully we'll have a test-ready game at the end of the month. We are behind on schedule on the programming side, but they are confident.
Jonathan and I are working hard on trying to animate and make the menu look nice. It will be animated in 3D and have some finishing touches in 2D. Here's a test render:

And as a final, here's a fake screen shot from the game:

This week we had two presentations. One for Annika Fogelgren and one for Ernest Adams. Annica is a former student and one of our mentors for the course "Big Game". She gave us a lot of good criticism on how to present our work, but didn't have anything to say about the game in general. She was worried about our lack of programmers and gave us some tips about how to motivate our group.

Ernest Adams is a Game Design and Production Consultant that HGO hires to help the students make better designed games. He liked our idea and even said it was good design. He also said that we were a bit overconfident about how many features we wanted to have in the game, but after listening to the other groups we were more realistic. He was a bit worried about our lack of programmers (we are starting to see a pattern here).

We are still waiting for internet in our office, so we are still working in the university's rooms. We managed to persuade them to get a HD monitor for testing.
This week...
Ruben finished the main characters this week and he is now continuing on with the "general". He has established a good work flow now, so each character takes about three days to do.
Jonatan has finished cleaning and rigging one of the characters and he started to animate it. The animation, run and ide are finished so far. It took some time to clean because of last minute decisions (and a day of illness).


Simon did most of the sound effects for the boss and he powers for the avatars. Alexander did a lot of persistant particle effects, like smoke, water, dust and some for the stone character. He can't do as much as he wants because our lead programmer is absent he can't get the help he needs.
Esteban did some concepts for civilians and line art for the pause menu. I, Nina, finished the logo and pause menu and came up with some ideas with Esteban on how to show the "current selection" in the menu.
The programmers are not here at the moment. The volcanic eruption on Iceland prevents all flying, so he couldn't get here on schedule. He'll be here on Tuesday, or so we all hope.

A quick update with some pictures, these are running animations for the lancer:





art by Ruben Johansson, animations by Jonatan Hagström and finishing touch by Esteban Soto.

Hi there,
my name is Nina Moritz and I am the Producer for the upcoming co-op game "Pawns"! Northern Gate is the name of our group.

The assignment:
We have nine weeks to finish the game, then we are going to show the game on the Gotland Game Awards on the 7-9 june.

The game:Our game is called Pawns and it is a 2D scrolling two player game. Its main focus is co-op and teamwork. You play as a creature of nature and fight back the humans that are trying to cut down the last forest. To your help you have been given powers of nature that you can combine with a friend for more awesome powers.
The visual style is a mix of steampunk and aquarellpainting, as if you were playing on a canvas or in a book.
The game is made for the xbox 360.The team members creating this game are:
Nina Moritz, Producer and interface designer, can be found on Linkedin and Deviantart. I just do the "things that someone have to do".
Esteban Soto, Lead designer and Art director, was art director for Chubby Chase Race. He has some of his art at Deviantart. Practically everything must go trough Esteban before getting a "OK".
Ruben Johansson, Enviromental and Character artist has his portfolio at Deviantart. He was lead artist for the arcade game Shoofly. He does most of the art in the game, mainly the in-game art.
Alexander Oltner, Sprite artist and Level designer. He does all the particle effects and has been somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades.
Simon Öhman, Lead level designer and Sound engineer. He did the level design with alex and he's good at finding things that work.
Jonatan Hagström, 2D animator, he has some of his art at Deviantart. He's actually a 3D artist but we make him do animations for us anyway.
Mikael Gullberg, Lead Programmer. He does the backbone of the game.
Tommy Siverman, Senior Programmer. He does all the important features, like using powers and main characters.
and last, Mikko Jokela, who is creating the music for this game. He did the music for Shoofly and a 2D game called Pavor Nocturnus aswell.

So far we have...
We started this project when this school-year started, but we only met once a week. While working on the concept some of our teammembers decided to work on a new game, so Mikael and Jonatan are currently working on a second project, a 3D game called "Victorious Skies".
The concept was finished (with all pictures and such) by Christmas, and we have been working as much as we can on it, even if we had other courses that had to take priority.

This week:
This week we changed our engine to "IceCream", which is a open source 2D engine for XNA. We also completed our sketches for the booth that we are going to show our game in on GGA.
We (Nina) decided on a new schedule where we work 8 hours a day, including saturdays, so we can be done on time. Philippe from DungeonCrawl came with the great news that we were going to get an office space next week, so now there won't have to be any confusion about where to be and when and so on.
Some of the members took a longer easterholiday so a lot of time got lost... But we presented the game for our mentor and he seemed pleased with how far we had gotten.
So, the programmers changed the engine to IceCream, so everything should go much smoother now. Hopefully.
Simon did lots of sound effects, for the enemies and main characters.Ruben was gone the whole normal work-week, but he finished the "charger" and he is working on making one of the main characters easier to animate.Jonatan made animations for the charger and cleaned previously made animations.
Alexander learned a new program for making particle effects and he made some environmental effects (like rain and smoke).
Esteban ran around as usual and made decisions, and helping everyone with their tasks. He held a presentation and he's working on making it even better! He and I finished up the booth as well.

So what did I do? Besides creating this blog (and our facebook page) I remade our entire schedule and booked a meeting so we could get feedback on our booth. I finished the logo and started tuning on the menu, with the help of Esteban. Sneak-peek:Looking good!
So even though we didn't have as much time as we wanted this week we made a lot of important decisions and managed to get some OK's from Esteban. Check in next weekend for the next update!