Highest Rated Comments


jbernhardsson11 karma

1: No comment! :)

2: I studied programming (including games) in high school. Then I studied primarily game programming, but including some design, for three years of University. And then I learned a lot while working at Mojang. The thing is, you never stop learning new things. Like directing voice actors or help to master the sounds which I have never done before this project. :)

3: We started January, two years ago. So a maybe 28 months or so. :)

jbernhardsson6 karma

This has just been a very long day/week/three or four months getting the game out. I'm really very happy. Sara, our producer, CEO, or whatever she calls herself says that I'm one of the happiest people she knows! :)

jbernhardsson5 karma

When it comes to skills, I find that it usually comes down to design, programming, art, and sound. But each game has a slider for each of those and some even have a story which is a hidden fifth category. I know of very few developers who are good everything so I always recommend teaming up with someone else.

When it comes to making the actual game, I think you should just start by making a simple part of the game. Something that is entertaining by itself, like walking around and turning on lights like you do in our game (a small part of the finished product). :)

jbernhardsson4 karma

Glad to be here! My job is similar to a movie director in that I'm responsible for the vision of the project. Now, in addition to that, I also code and solve a lot of our technical issues. When working on Lake Ridden, I have directed voice actors, designed core game mechanics and been a general problem fixer. Today, I have played our whole game all the way through, twice, making sure it works exactly like it is supposed to. I fixed a few issues and helped our art team prioritize what they needed to do today. My core responsibility is to complete experience from Lake Ridden, to make sure that design, art and sound work great together. :)

It is very different to working on Minecraft in many ways. Even when I started working on that, the core design was already set and we just kept moving Minecraft in that direction. We were also able to get a lot more feedback during the development which makes releasing a lot scarier. :)

jbernhardsson4 karma

The most difficult design decision I had to make during the development was to basically change the whole game. Originally, Lake Ridden started out as more of a horror game mixed with puzzles.

When we let people try it out, it turned out that our target audience didn't like the horror part one bit. So we had to redesign most of the game (with less than a year left in production), including rewriting all the story and creating new locations. We also made the puzzles a lot harder. I think that in the end, this created a far superior game! :)