Balancelot

A story of a squire, who wanted to become a knight. Aka a school project which grew into a hit. 

Balancelot is a game development project which was started in January 2018 as a part of project studies of the Bachelors Degree in Data and Business Management. The main target of the project was to plan and develop a playable and sell-able prototype of a either a video game or web-application.

The idea of Balancelot was invented by the Lead Artist of the group, Noora Vähälä , and was chosen out of a handful of game concepts by a group and through vote and feedback-session among the students of the course, teachers and a couple of game-dev professionals. Balancelot was ranked as one of the games-to-be-made.

Fast forward to February 2019, the game is being finalized and it’s ready to be published on Steam for sale.

My duties through the production process included the following:

• Social Media Marketing
• Creating the Web-site for the game
• Graphic Designer of marketing material
• Supporting game-artist
• Assisting secretary, once the possibility of starting a company was suggested

The project has so far taught about the importance of organizing and scheduling tasks based on priority and how time consuming the task might be. Since my focus in previous studies had been more on marketing rather than on code and technical side of the development, a good part of the time of my tasks where spent on learning about SEO, taking care of the social media and setting up and moving a WordPress-site to a server from marketing side. From the artistic side of things, it took a moment to get back to flow with creating graphic material after a few years of break from active drawing and painting, but closer to end of the spring I had been able to create a collection of supporting assets, three animated enemy characters and a first version of opening animation.

After Spring 2018 the team had to decide whether to continue doing the project and publish the game, or abandon it. We chose to keep working on it. For many summer 2018 was spent earning money at summer jobs.  Autumn 2018 was  a time for student exchange in the Netherlands, studying full days to keep up with study credits. In other words, game-dev had to be left to the background for a while.

Starting from February 2019, started the process of learning to use Adobe Premiere to create Cut-Scenes for the game, and finding a calling from animation. It is a branch of creative problem solving with visual feedback, much like web-coding. The technique and workflow are still a bit too slow for my liking, but like with many creative things, first you need to stumble for a while to get comfortable and familiar with the tools, and later the time taken in the beginning will be paid back as fluent workflow.

Some of the assets and small previews of the Cut Scenes will be updated to my Artstation through the Spring 2019.