Ambient Pressure: Swimming Animation, Diver

This week I’ll be talking about my process in the making of the main character’s animation.
First off, I did a very loose sketch of how the animation could look like, even before the base sprite was finished. This was to just feel if I could really pull off a swimming animation and to give myself some time to consider how to work with it. So, here is the first sketch which I worked from:

It only includes the basic, main […]

First of tutorial levels

I was persuaded to split up my design for a large Mole Munch tutorial level into smaller levels, and I belive this was fortunate because now when somebody tries the game they won´t need to deal with too much new information within a single level. It also allowed for some new dynamics when I decided to make the first level quite small and without any real danger to the player.
Because the game only use the arrow keys, one key to […]

Speldesign Blogg #3

Denna vecka har jag äntligen klarat det! Förra veckan så jobbade jag med en HealthBar och p.g.a sjukdom så gick det inte speciellt bra. Men denna vecka har verkligen varit en kickstart för mig. Jag har nu lyckats få en helt funktionell healthbar! Den fungerar så att om fienden krockar med spelaren tappar spelaren liv och då sjunker livet som visas av healtbaren. Healthbaren fungerar så att den använder programmets egna form-skapare. Så den skapar en fyrkant, som minskar i bredd […]

Update #3 On Project Mole Munch

This week we finally managed to get the water flowing without lagging up the entire computer. To give a short recap from the concept (more can be found in the first post here), I’ll describe the purpose of the water as an artifact in the game. Further down in the post I’ll describe how it was achieved and the motivation behind the steps taken to make it work.
First off, the water is the […]

Dynamic level creation and pooling

This week my main objective has been focusing of managing how our game handles entities (basically objects of the game like: obstacles, powerups and background objects). The way our game works now is that in the beginning the entire level structure is imported from a couple of text files and straight after that we create new instances (copies) of the objects and places those instances at the spots specified in the text file.
This might sound all good and great but […]

Animating Items

Hello Magic Writer fans!
So this week I have been working mainly on animating the objects that the wizard throws. We had discussed whether or not to have animated objects. The thought process being that we would lose out on more objects in favor of more polished ones. I had long been an advocate for having animated objects as this would make the game look and feel a lot better in my opinion. I agree that having a big library of […]

Space Shooter Project Blog: Post #3

It’s once again time to shed light on the work I’v done this week. Since I finished the design for the first level last week, I have now been assigned to work on the decorations for the level. In this post I will cover the first two props I made and  some of the thoughts that went into them.

These are the props; a barrel and a container, seen from above. The first one I made was the barrel, […]

Week 6 Mole Munch

Week 6 of the production. It has been a week since the alpha presentation. Our presentation went great and we got some feedback from our scrum master telling us that we did a good job. We did not get our water mechanic to work tough which was a real bummer. Still, our game showed the main mechanics and our teacher understood what the game was about.

 
This week I worked on the animation for the digging transition between overworld and underground. […]

Creating sound FX for Dragon’s Song part 1 – Lasers vs singing

So moving into Beta I’m tasked with creating a lot of different sound FX for our game. The first thing I need to say is that while a laser sound or a gun FX might be just a second long little snippet of noise they are actually often more difficult and time consuming to produce than a soundtrack. As a musician I have years of education, experience and tools to help me perform, but when asked: ”how does a singing […]

The Last Signal. Post #3: sprite management considerations

The projects (games) which we are working on in the course 5SD033 – Introduction to Game Development may not be big, but they are considerably bigger in scope than the simple games in 5SD022 – Game Programming I course.
In these games, a lot of sprites are required. A pressing need for a flexible sprite manager arises.
I spent a lot of time simply thinking about the right strategy to handle sprites. I also had my awful GameState::Enter() function in mind; it […]

Creating sound FX for Dragon’s Song part 1 – Lasers vs singing

So moving into Beta I’m tasked with creating a lot of different sound FX for our game. The first thing I need to say is that while a laser sound or a gun FX might be just a second long little snippet of noise they are actually often more difficult and time consuming to produce than a soundtrack. As a musician I have years of education, experience and tools to help me perform, but when asked: ”how does a singing […]

Team 12 Report 3 – Including animations and implementing it into our engine.

Hello! This week I will go through what I have been working on for this week. This week my task was to implement an old Animation skeleton from the SDL library to our new engine that is SFML based. This task proved itself to be a very hard challenge, my initial prediction of the time it would take was around 20 hours but that was a way to positive and naive prediction.
What I have made: I have converted the old […]