Game Design 2: GUI & HUD

The last 2 weeks, I have been working on finalizing the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and HUD (Heads-Up Display) for the game my team has been working on (Shelfish). When it came to the main menu I had an idea from the start, I wanted to use wooden blanks for the button background, in addition to sticking to the design theme by making cartoonish text with still an element of humor. For the planks, I simply started sketching different types, […]

Flower Power

Very cool, amirite?
In this post I am going to talk about the patterns for shooting that the boss in our game uses. The patterns that the group came up with were spirals, cones and pulsating circles, you can see some examples of how these turned out in the GIFs below. To go along these patterns I also wanted the boss to be able to increase the complexity of the shooting the closer to death it got.



 
For the first […]

Expired Code

This week I will not be writing about exciting new features, but instead of something very serious and important: moldy code.

Forgetting to Close the Fridge
Most people are more excited about fresh food than the leftovers. I’ve been implementing features at lightning speed, but not putting any hours for code refactoring.
Always hack it in. If something works, just drop it (even if the implementation is half done). If it stops working, go back and fix it.
The Mold
A couple weeks of haxing […]

Level Design – Beta

Hello. In this post I will talk about level design, in this case specifically built for the Beta milestone and presentation. A level that was designed in such a way to showcase the game in the short amount of time we were given to present it. If you’d like to learn more about this project you can check my previous blog posts “An Easier Sprint Overview” where I talk about changes to a template that we received from […]

A moving, but readable text projectile

This week, on the game project Revenge of Teddy…
Recently, I had redesigned the previously paper planes throwing enemy into an enemy that uses laughter as it weapon to fit a new bullet pattern that was implemented. The projectile connected with the enemy had to be changed as well, from paper planes to something that signals “dangerous laughter”, so that is what I’m going to be talking about this week.
Both of my initial ideas where based around comic book sound effects, […]

Blog 5 – Week 10

Pause, Wait a Minute
Good evening, another week has passed and next week is the final version of our game. This week I worked on the pause menu along with some more sound implementation and cleaning up the main menu a bit. Though this post will focus on the pause menu and how I went about making it work. I approached this week knowing that I wanted to implement the pause menu which would display a “Restart” button, “Menu” button and […]

Baby steps in animation

Your pal Stella from Team Nazgul here once again to give you a peek into the radical world of making a video game happen.
This week we’ll take a look at my choppy first attempt at a walk loop for the Witch Hunter boss in Burn Witch, Burn.

Sprite sheet of the first key frames of the walk cycle 

I’m not a very experienced animator so from the very start I knew doing this project could be a mouthful […]

The beggining of the end

This is my fifth blog post, the first one some days after the presentation of the beta. Since the game passed the beta state and is now moving towards the finish line, the implementation of new features is not possible, so I spend most of the time fixing bugs and balancing the game. In this blog I won’t talk about something specific but mostly of the before and after the beta.
After the beta playtest, we immediately started working, with the […]

Polishing the game.

After the previous week, where we had to finish all the important features for the beta, most stuff that is left is polishing what we already have implemented. So I guess the artefact I am writing about this week is polishing because there is not really a lot to say about one specific thing.
For starters, we had some fixing to do with the power-ups we had implemented last week. I added cooldown for the flamethrower and fire shield. For the […]

Blog Post 3/9/2017 Final Touches

Unfortunately its getting close to the end of our game development and we are wrapping up what’s left. So there isn’t much for me to report on this week and even less for me to go into detail about. However, I still plan on going through the few things I worked on.

We have always planned on having minor details in the rooms. The plan for the backstory of why you are in an abandoned office, is that they just moved […]

Displaying enemy kills through cards.

Paradebar highlighted showing the amount of kills. The more yellow version with a + sign indicates that the player recieved an upgrade on that kill.
After 18 kills the parade bar will start over from the beginning again.
Throughout this whole time designing our game, the single hardest thing to get a clear grasp of has been the “parade system”. The paradesystem is supposed to show progress through the level by having slain enemies follow behind the player avatar in a line, […]

Blog Post #5

Hello,
For my last blog post I’ll be talking about the Beta presentation we held a week ago.
The presentation itself went fairly well and we got some really good feedback from the teachers. For the Beta release of our game we focused a lot on instructional feedback for the players to guide them through the game. Players getting lost or not knowing what to do was a major problem for our game during both previous playtestings, so for the last couple […]