University Projects, Synapse week 5 and Spark Week 1

So, long week, did not have the time to actually write a blog post until now.

So what has happened here during this week. To start it off, we started week 5 trying to get something more and playable out of the game, we weren’t able to, I worked with the presentation and helping out on programming, but for no good, we were stuck with a dead product that almost no one in the team believed in.

So on tuesday on week 6, we pivoted. Hard. We scrapped everything and are now working on a new project which we only have 2 weeks to complete, but we are actually at a better state than before. Which is good.

The game is a 2D platformer called spark, I’ve been designing the game and making sure everyone got work to do and it has worked brilliantly, we have gotten to the point where the game really works.

I myself, has been doing technical art and programming, trying to both script all of the animations and helping our lead programmer solve problems with our combat system. I’ve also implemented and designed the tutorial level.

My scripting and programming work has mainly been with constructing enemy behaviours by creating a state machine and making animation scripts.

I’ve also fixed all of the hand ins necessary to enter GGC.

So, Picture time, first I’ll present some screenshots from the actual game (As we have them now) and after that I will discuss the design of the game

So the game is a 2D Combat Platformer. The player faces the horrors in their own mind and fights the way through them. The game is about defeating deppression or failing to do so.

The player avatar is Hope, The last soldier of the Flame and she fights against the monsters of deppression, anxiety and paranoia. The player avatar is small, with limited lighting. The player can fight using light attacks, heavy attacks, combat rolls and blocking. The monsters of the game heavily telegraph their attack but all deal high amount of damage, so avoiding or blocking attacks are often more important then dealing damage. As when the player loses life, their vision sphere gets smaller and smaller the lower their health is.

The player lights braziers through out the level. These braziers are checkpoints. but compared to other games, these checkpoints are not permanent, the player can only use one checkpoint at a time and after you have died 3 times, the player cannot reuse that specific checkpoint. If they die before they find a new one, the game is over.

For GGC we have 2 monsters and 1 Mini-Boss planned, but we are not 100% certain the boss will be completed (we hope it will be). We also have a tutorial level and one regular level.