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.
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!
