Niche - a genetics survival game

Welcome dear friends of fright and horror to another WORKSHOP WEEK! Our teachers: Some “business business” architecture guys, talking about how important it is to be on time and are late constantly. Also, starting a lesson with the words “I’m not prepared at all” is not a good idea. Especially if you than still think everything coming out of your mouth is gold and students are toootally interested in your random thoughts. After some “inputs” we were send out to find and document a so called “Urban Device”.
Andi and me went to the cinéma Abaton to look for our devices there. He chose a movie projector and I decided to document the Selecta vending machine. Mr Popovic, the cinéma boss was so kind to open the machine for me. Hoorray for mister Popovic! Andi and me had fun on our trip, so the day turned out ok.

After school it was time for a Niche team meetup. Actually, it was the first meeting where ALL local team members came together. To celebrate this, we went to the Tibits to have diner together. Was nice to see the whole pack on one table and I’m glad they all get along great so far
We mostly talked about the future of Niche, defining roles and goals. We will soon meet up and tear the whole game apart. Meaning that we will only keep the core mechanics and see what we would change/improve. That might also includes building a small new prototype. I’m really looking forward to this experiment!

After todays workshop introduction our class is now officially allowed to use the Low-Tec machines. This includes the Laser Cutter and the awesome 3D printers!

My first 3D print ever! Tools used: Tinkercad, Cura

Also, I’m very pleased to announce that our game Niche was chosen to be exhibited at the Norwich Gaming Festvial next month! I’ve never been to the UK before. A dear friend of mine, Tom Kail who is also part of the Playful Oasis team, invited to stay at his place

My morning was spent mostly organizing stuff and answering mails while sitting on our balcony and enjoying the beautiful, sunny weather. In the afternoon, the game design master student met up to play a board game about “programming your robot and reach the goal” in the ETH cafeteria.
We didn’t finish the round because we had to leave early to go toooooooo….

the Outlane! Check out all these cool pinball and arcade mashines
After a brief history and technical insight we were free to play all the games. Fun fun fun!

A nice surprise was waiting for me back home. Unity 5 has been released! I downloaded it right away and tried to update Niche. It worked without any issues. Unfortunately the feature I was looking forward to the most (the HTML5 export with WebGL) didn’t work for me. Have to investigate the issue!
Also, I bought a plugin called Shader Forge and will play around with it soon.

After some rather informative lessons during the last two days, today shit got real.
All game design master students (1. & 3. semester) got together to introduce themselves and analyse some game mechanics. We started of with a simple little finger pointing game which we had to interrupt because of a mysterious alarm inside the school. Although our school has already achieved nationwide fame for its false amok alarms, we fled the scene.
We ended up in a restaurant / bar called sphères, where we analysed the mechanics of Mau-Mau.
Interesting fact: About half the group didn’t know how to play Mau-Mau (me included).

After the end of the schoolday, we had a group meeting for our game Niche – a genetics survival game.
We mostly discussed possible improvements and new features.
Better organisation and tracking were also a big topic. Lots of things to improve!
Beat (our Sound Desiger) even helped me fix my stupid delegate bug, hurray