New week, and it’s time to get back to work after I finally managed to beat that pesky cold! Luckily, only I seem to have gotten sick this time around, so let’s hope Teddy and Fred keep staying healthy.

This week I’ll begin with making one of the more important rooms of the third floor: a ‘hub’ room of sorts that will lead you to various other places, and will also be quite an important place on this ship:

In the second part of the hub room, or the dining hall, or the bar, or whatever you’d like to call it, we’ll focus on some new props and decorations to make the room a bit more interesting. Also, moss!

Going back to the boss room where you’ll meet the giant eye boss, once it got it’s regular version it of course needs a ghost world version as well; in fact, you’ll be spending most of this fight in the ghost world whether you want to or not!

We’re trying to keep this room rather simple, as there will be quite a lot of things on the floor and walls here; eyes of various kinds and magic attacks to avoid, so throwing too many decorations into this space would be a bad idea.

And here we have a comparison of the old, placeholder version of the room (first) and the new, proper version (second):

And so, after another set of long weeks, the second of the three floors of the Ghost Ship has been finished. This includes a bunch of details, more ghosts, the fridge boss in it’s finished form, strange encounters and gunpowder – oh my!

Now it’s on to finishing floor 3, and after that, the last boss fight of the ship which we so far haven’t touched much but which we hope will be super exciting once we get there :D

And of course, with the completion of the second floor, Fred has also finished up a bunch of animations for decorations (and enemies) that you will encounter there! Here’s a bunch

This week was rather different than a regular week, cause it was GGC week! This means we were helping out with the conference, judging the games made at the school and selecting the winners that will receive awards in the award ceremony the whole conference culminates in.

This is always a nice opportunity for us to hang out with some other people in the business, share ideas and learn from them and what they’re doing – there were plenty of interesting talks on work environment this year during the conference which is a very interesting topic for our industry at this time.

First though, a quick finished version of the eye boss room which has so far only existed in a very basic sketch version, before diving into the expo stuff:

So then, GGC officially started and it started with some fun!

Monday evening we went to a meet & greet for all the jury members for this years event, hanging out with old and new friends from the industry at fellow Visby gamedevs Eat, Create, Sleep’s super cool office building.

We had some pizza and some wine, talked and played some games:

Then, it was back to work – although not our usual kind. Instead we spent most of the Tuesday listening to student presentations, after which we were off to the booth crawl, where the jury gets to actually try out all of the games for the first time.

Some pictures from the presentations I watched, I gotta admit I’m very impressed with them this year – the presentations have all been great and everyone’s english is super good compared to way back when I went to the gamedev program (one of the perks of turning it into a proper international education, I suppose):

So, after the presentations were done, all of the judges went to the showfloor for this year’s booth crawl, where we’re allowed to play the games in relative peace (it’s only open to the judges and the other students this evening). There’s also a bar to make things more fun…

During this time we played a majority of the games. There were a lot of cool ones as always, and many interesting new ideas.

Here’s a bunch of pictures from the showfloor:

Then, on Wednesday, we played any games we might have missed. It was also one of the hottest days of this summer yet, so we took a couple breaks to sit by the sea and discuss the games we’d played while slowly melting in the sunlight.

In the evening there was a jury-only dinner at the school’s restaurant, after which we all sat down together to discuss which games we wanted to nominate for each of the award categories.

During the final day, we had a couple hours to play any games nominated by the other jurors, before finally sitting down to decide on which games should be given which award. Last year, this discussion took hours – thankfully it was quicker this time around. Then in the evening, there was the great award ceremony and after party which was a blast but from which I unfortunately didn’t get any pictures.

Sadly, I ended up catching a cold right as we finished up GGC, so I haven’t had much energy to do anything the last couple of days. I’m hoping to be back to work in a couple days, but if I know myself well enough this cold will take it’s time to sort itself out so I wouldn’t expect any new recap posts next week – fingers crossed that I’m wrong! :(

New week, and it’s time to finish up that ghost shop room by turning it into it’s spirit world version! For me, that means more darkness and some changed up colours, but once Fred gets his hand on this room, he’ll be adding some floating ghosts and creepy things in those cages among other things :)

Next up we have a special room that will appear in two different version! The first version is this, which is a perfectly ordinary room, no?

Of course, even the regular version of this room needs a proper ghost world version in case the player decides to turn the spirit lens on:

Now, for the second version of this room… It’s certainly different! See, the first time you’ll enter this room, you won’t be able to see the door. Instead, you’ll come face to face with just an ordinary wall.

And what lies behind the wall if you pass into the spirit world?

A mysterious, never ending bridge….. Of course!

And naturally, I have to make the version with just the wall as well, so here goes:

So what’s this bridge? Where does it lead? Can a neverending bridge actually lead anywhere? What does any of this actually mean? Well… It’ll all become very clear soon enough! Soon…