Morris: Mortality Rate - Diary


A developer diary of game project one at Playgroundsquad

This page contains brief weekly summaries, and links to the diary written daily
during the production of my first game project at Playgroundsquad.

Overview

Morris: Mortality Rate is an isometric dungeon crawler shoot 'em up game all about strategic decision making and fast paced gunplay. Take control of the teddy bear Morris and battle your way through a huge factory by surviving through a sprawling series of rooms filled with dangerous robot enemies. Improve your arsenal of weapons and your physical attributes along the way to aid you in your battle against the evil AI terrorizing humanity.

For this project I had the role of lead game designer and project manager, focusing on communications, overseeing gameplay and implementing systems.

You can dowload the game

here.


Week 1

The first week of the first game project was allocated to pre-production. The team assigned roles to our members and we started establishing a universal vision for the art and gameplay design. Artists got busy making concept art and moodboards, programmers made flow charts and we designers started work on gameplay design and the GDD.


Week 2

During the second week of development we focused on getting the basics set up fully and started creating some whitebox levels, preparing to make a proof of concept to start testing.


Week 3

For our third week, the team put our focus on creating a proof of concept of the game. Our goal was to have a basic version playable by Friday. We prioritized finishing up the most vital aspects that the game needs to run, and presented a basic version of our tutorial level for the school.


Week 4

This week, we mainly started the transition from the basic systems we had previously been using to the final versions that we will ship. During most of this transition, we knew that the game would not be able to run or build properly anymore since the systems were incomplete.


Week 5

During week five we wanted to finish everything gameplay related, so that our final week could be spent bugfixing, balancing and optimizing.


Week 6

Final week! We had to rush to fix up everything, making sure the game was complete by the time we presented on Thursday morning.