Game Development Update #4

Yo, yo, yo! Welcome back my loyal followers for another weekly update. It has been another ineresting week in the making of Samsara.
What’s been so interesting? I know, sing me a song about your week!
Nah, recording a song and put it up here would be to much of a hassle right now. SOrry to dissapoint you, but for now, text will have to suffice.
This week after recieving a new batch of feedback from a playtesting session one thing emerged as […]

Making a hunter

Without danger I think our game would fall flat.  It’s not that fun flying aroud in the darkness without some tension. from the start we said that there should be at least three enemies in our game and we started off by makinig the hunters. I wanted everything in our game to feel alive and therefore i didn’t want the hunters just standing in one position.
Idle state
At the start of a new game, the player is not close enough to […]

Blog 4 – Focus

This week I feel the week started early. The team grouped together on Sunday to get things ready for the Play-Testing. The meeting was going to be a collaboration day, where we would implement what we had done together. Unfortunately, some individuals felt that they would have time to finish what they were supposed to do before implementing it. This resulted in a waste of time, and some scolding followed.

 
My main focus of the week was getting the Beta Presentation […]

Week 4 – To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome for the blog of this week ! As you noticed already in the title, I will talk today about all the work I’ve been through this week to draw some sprites for dead enemies. (I’m sorry for all Conan’s fan who thought that according to the title I was going to talk about Conan, but the cake is ALWAYS a lie. )
So, this week I was in charge of drawing some sprites for the 2 […]

Interpreting Feedback and Implementing Fixes

During the last playtest session, most of the feedback we got was related to the movement. Some found it pretty easy to use and liked the way it worked, while others found themselves hitting walls constantly. As a result of this, identifying the problem was relatively hard.
The way we decided to try and mend the problem without completely redoing the movement, since a lot of people liked it, was to start of by fixing the stone walls since we knew there were […]

Flow theory

In this post I will talk about flow and how I relate to flow theory when I thought about the design for our game. I will mainly talk about the three things, difficulty curve, the rules to flow and mental complexity. I will I will try to recap to my last blog post about subconscious design and how flow theory support to implement subconscious design in your game.
My impression of what people most take with the with the flow is […]

Designing and creating the menus.

This week I’ve focused a lot on the menu we want for our game. We do have a menu in our current game already but it is very basic and you can only press the “start” button.
We hadn’t really discussed what we wanted the menu to look like, or even what buttons we thought were necessary. We wanted the basic choices such as “start”, “exit” and “options”, but we talked about adding other choices as well.
We also had to decide […]

Blog post 3/2/2017 Main Menu

This wasn’t necessarily a productive week for me. I have still been working on the finishing assets for our game, whose deadline we are rapidly approaching. I find myself rushing to finish what is left in order to be ready for any last minute needs, i.e. if we forgot something.

I started my week off by working on the Main Menu. This task wasn’t very hard to finish, but the planning for how i wanted it to look and looking for […]

Game Design 2: Explosion Animation

Last week, I worked on creating a explosion for when the bazooka would either hit an in-game object like for example, a platform or rock,or the in-game enemies. Since the bazooka is used to take out numerous enemies at once, we thought an explosion would help communicate to the player that the enemies are being hit with a certain amount of force, hence the explosion.
I started by making a few sketches on how the explosion could look, while keeping in mind […]

The Effect of Crossfading Soundtrack

This has been a cool addition to the game!
The soundtrack changes depending on which realm the player currently is in. If the player is in the human realm, asian instruments and taiko drums plays. If the player is in the spirit realm, the soundtrack goes all electronic and choirs are heard singing.
By the time I had to implement this dynamic effect, the gameplay themes of the game were nearly done, but still usable as they were. In fact, these uploaded tracks aren’t […]

Week 6

Preparation for Beta Presentation
For this week’s blogpost I will talk about my preparations for the beta presentation that will be held next week on Monday. When my group and I decided on who would do the presentation for the alfa, I figured my team members would have more knowledge about details of the game, and therefore would be more competent than I in answering questions from our teacher following the presentation. We later noticed that most groups had chosen their […]

Responding to playtest feedback

This week started with a playtesting session. I was prepared to skip it since we did not have a lot of new stuff to playtest. The group, however, insisted that we attend it anyway, and so we did. From the previous playtesting session the only major thing we had was a new control scheme, though admittedly, we did get some valuable feedback on that.
The new control scheme (that we had changed from previous playtest session) was that instead of the […]