Game Development- Introduction. Blog Post – 1

In this course all student are split into 12 groups of about 6-8 people in each group. Each group will together developing a game which is based on a concept document.

In my group we are 3 programmers and 3 graphic artists.  We did chose to create a game based from the concept document ESCAPE.

Why did we choose ESCAPE?

We did chose ESCAPE because we felt it was the most interesting concept of the one we could choose. We did also had a voting where ESCAPE got the most votes.

The work began and every Mondays we are giving out weekly tasks to each person. Every Friday we have a sprint review where we check everyone´s work during the week.

Last week I worked on the Tileset / Tilemap settings and this week i am working on the enemy – movement pattern.

I started as I said with the Tileset. We needed to draw out our sprite sheets on the screen in order to create a map/level. Since we not necessary need to build a large level before (Beta test), I decided to build a simple temporary system to draw out the sprites. But later we will try to create an editor that we can build levels with. To use an editor will becomes a lot easier and it will save our time. The system we are using now is based on reading coordinates from a text file and set the sprites position.

As shown below this system becomes very confusing when you are building larger maps.

Coordinates are based on remake the pixels of a image into positions. I find it hard to explain but should show an image below that shows each coorinate of a sprite.

First colum : Position x= 0, y = 0. It loads a sprite from coordinates 0,0

Second colum: Position x = 1, y= 0. It loads a sprite from coordinates 64,0

There are better and simpler system but this is very easy if you have small map. As I have said, we will probably create an editor later which we can bulid levels much easier with.

I dont have so much more to write about right now, but more updates are comming. I can share with some photos from the pre-alpha

A picture with our field-of-viewe system and one where you see everything. You can move the characters and the wall collision is working.