So we finished the final report for our bachelor’s thesis. Feels good! There is an abstract in English, the rest is in Swedish.

Download the thesis: Watch Out Banana!: Lärdomar av spelutveckling i XNA Game Studio

All bachelor theses under our institute dedicated today to exhibiting their results (the projects aren’t completely over, but it’s time to focus on the reports). We were instructed to create two posters and have them outside a group room booked for us and another project. Students would then walk between the various projects and get the opportunity to learn more about the various results.

Some people showed up and play tested our game, there isn’t that much content but I suppose that teaches visitors a bit about how hard it is to make games. :)

Turns out it’s a bit trickier making a game engine than we first hoped, even when basing it off an existing one. As a result it’s a bit hard to play around with different designs and ideas as was our initial vision for the game. As a result, I decided to prototype the second level in Multimedia Fusion 2, a tool I’m familiar with and can play around with easily.

The result is a prototype which I have been able to use to discuss level design with team mates and testers.

Download the prototype (PC): Bana 2 (Level 2)

Today all bachelor projects in our institute presented their ideas and progress so far. We made a few slides showing graphical concepts and our current prototype with placeholders.

By now we have spent some time sketching and conceptualizing some ideas for what the game could be. What we are currently going for is something inspired by games like Grow Cube by Eyezmaze where the player interact with a scene in an exploratory, playful manner to solve a puzzle of sorts.

It’s been about two weeks since we signed a group contract on how to work together on the bachelor’s project. The contract follows a standard form where we agree to things like how often we will have meetings, how we distribute workload and how me make decisions as a group.

The group consist of me, my friend whom I wrote the proposal for the project with, another class mate whom we both know from before, another student of the same project as us whom we have seen around and two more from another program. They seem like nice people and I really enjoy meeting with and working with new people so I think it will be a blast!

Me and my friends proposal for a bachelor’s project was accepted, with the slight modification that it should be a project for six people. This will probably increase our ambition level a bit, but it will be super fun making games while also studying to become a a computer engineer (for those who are not that familiar in the matter, computer engineers don’t generally work with computer games specifically).

I’m in my third year at Chalmer’s university of technologies and it’s time to pick subject for my bachelor’s thesis. Here at Chalmers there are a bunch of suggestions on possible topics from the university, but you can also come up with your own project to write a thesis on. Me and a friend decided on doing the latter.

If it’s accepted, we will be working a game using the XNA gamestudio framework which I learned during a summer course. In order for it to have a chance of getting approved, we have suggested that emphasis will be on interactivity and simulation within a virtual world. Hope it gets approved!