Hi all! How are you? At the Midnight Hub office our development is moving forward, and last week we had a very special guest. Nonother than the King of Sweden visited the incubator where we’re located, and Midnight Hub was hand-picked to showcase our upcoming game Lake Ridden for His Majesty! We presented our game among three other interesting incubated companies.
Work in progress. We’re making sure the interior environments in Lake Ridden are fun to explore! Each place tells its own story and should have its very own personality!
The King does a yearly trip around Sweden to look at exciting tech industries and inventions, and this year he visited Malmö. Showing our game to the King, and answering his questions about team size, our background, target audience and the general game content was very exciting! The King really liked how the game looked, and the fact that we want to create games where violence is not the main hook! We got featured in national Swedish news, SVT among others, which is always fun!
The game is officially in a wrap-up-stage, but there’s still some work left to do, as seen here! Expect changes for things as lights, weather systems and water the upcoming months!
Regarding Lake Ridden we’re officially FINALLY in the stage where all development is concentrated around wrapping things up! We have listed absolutely everything we believe is left to do, in a sorted and prioritized backlog, assigning points to everything á la true SCRUM methodology. This required some heavy planning and long meetings, but doing this is of tremendous importance.
Another mysterious house from the game. Adding lights in the right kind of way is very hard work. It should help the player figure out where to go next, to enhance the gameplay and to set the mood. A lot of this will still change before we ship the game!
This helps everyone understand what exactly is left to do, in what order we should do it, and if we can do it all before the final deadline (and what to cut if we have to cut anything). Our ABC-recipe we described in earlier blog posts have been of great help as long as we worked more loosely with the game bottom-up, but now when we need to finalize everything SCRUM is a good project management method to use for us.
We have spent a lot of time the last two weeks with listing everything that still needs doing, to understand what everyone needs to do to hit our deadline in time. In the closing phase of this game project, we’re using the SCRUM methodology, like many other game companies out there!
Speaking of earlier blog posts, our series about stress, pipelines and how we try to make games in a smart way really took off! The texts got shared well beyond this blog and people have been emailing us, commenting on Gamasutra and adding us on Twitter. This blog broke all earlier visitor records! It makes me happy that fellow devs take such an interest in combatting stress in the games industry! You can always find the articles here:
- Project Management Part 1: Avoid Brain Damage From Working With Games.
- Project Management Part 2: Making Your Game With The ABC-Recipe
- Part 3: Burning Money, Brain Power, and Morale To Make Your Game
Until next time!
– Sara & The Lake Ridden Team