Pixel Art

HIIIIII! Welcome to my short entry about Pixel art! 
Pixel art as implied by its name is limited to use only a few pixels when creating an artwork. the popular style has its roots in early video games when the designers were limited to 8 or 16bit graphics but it is still widely used in many platform games and RPGs.
As the Lead Artist for this project I immediately made the decision to make our game using pixel art. My main reasoning […]

5SD064 – Enemy movement visualization

Today’s post is about the movement for one of the enemies in the game Aetherial, shown to the right in the image below. Enemies in traditional Shoot’ em ups tend to move in simple predetermined patterns, not taking the player’s position into account. In Aetherial, the enemies will try to move towards the player while also moving in patterns, making them hard to hit. I’m going to employ AI techniques described in the book: Programming Game AI by Example, by Mat […]

The animation cycle of a wing span

Aka. H***.
 

The though process behind this stale monstrosity was quite simple – effiency and modability. To explain further: Being the sole artist for the team I need to create a lot of assets and templates for said assets at a relativly high speed so that I won’t lag behind our programmer. Doing the animation properly, frame by frame, would almost be a week in itself. In an attempt to save my sanity I decided to create a semi-smooth wing cycle, […]

Week #1 – Making the Player

Who Am I?
Hello! I am Marcus Ford, a 1st year student studying Game Design & Programming at Uppsala University Campus Gotland. I was Born in England, but I spent the first half of my life in Sweden and the second half in the United States, only to come back to Sweden to study partially because of the education (but mostly because of the free tuition).
Why Am I Here?
I have wanted to be a game designer for as long as I […]

5SD064-Animation-bouncing balls

This week I have been working on the assignment for 2D1 course that the students were asked to animate a cannon ball and a rubber ball bouncing from a height and coming to a stop. After watching a short tutorial video, I started making my own bouncing ball by using the animation function in photoshop. There are four core principles when making animation in 2D space:
Solid, key drawing/pose = what happens
Timing = when it happens
Spacing = how it happens
Squash and stretch = the deformation […]

First Post: Perspective

My team and I are making a “shoot’em up” game in unity. I am writing this blog to try and talk about some of the issues we come across while developing the game. In our game, right now called Umibōzu, the player takes control of a fisherman out fishing in the ocean when a mysterious mist envelops the ship and weird creatures and other things start to appear. The player is tasked with escaping from the mist.
One of the things […]

Post #1: 360 No-Scoping the Project

Listen closely, for I am about to share with you a tale of great importance.
To correctly scope a project can be a challenge. Over-scoping is pervasive in video game development, where “feature creep” and underestimating the amount of time the game will take lead to games being delayed for years or canceled altogether (which can be a better outcome in some situations). How should one go about scoping their game? I don’t know. I’m inexperienced, a student, and this is a […]

Student blog

This will be a blog where I post about the work I do in school every week and the reasons why I do what I do and the thoughs I have about it.
Have a nice time reading my blog!
Sofie Lindberg

Project set-up: Product backlog

Welcome to my first blog post! I am the manager and producer of group Rakshasa. Our current objective is to create a 2D shoot ‘em up game working in the Scrum framework. We decided to use the “Fear is in me” concept document as the basis and we are striving to make the best our of it. The game is about little girl trying to overcome her nightmares. In her dreams she is lost in the forest and fights evil […]

Conceptualizing the Behemoth

As a task for the second week, I were to start making our ”Behemoth” main character for our game. It was to be a large, towering Mech (in contrast with the large airship of the original concept document), and it was supposed to feel like it was much larger than anything else on the screen.
I started out with a rough silhouette sketch to estimate what kind of shape I wanted it to be, and the general shape I wanted it […]

Blog 1: Level Design and Mechanics

After choosing the concept, Umibozu, we first decided to stick to most of the concept in terms of mechanics and level layout, but when trying it out in the game and seeing how it felt, I knew that there were some changes that needed to be made. At first the idea was that the player, a fisherman in a boat, was to travel through an endless scroller level until they encountered a boss, which they then had to run from. […]

Dev Blog #1 – The Setting

Hello everyone! This week I wanted to talk about the setting of the game and the general feeling we are trying to evoke.
The aesthetic goal of Aetherial is overcoming challenge -barely, and this is the core feeling upon which the mechanics are based. Team Devourer sought to expand upon this feeling however, so we modified the setting while still attempting to keep the aesthetic goal intact. While we followed the designs of the original concept rather closely, we did put […]