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 can remember starting back in High School when I made my first board game and continuing up until before Uppsala where I have worked on my own table top rpg game called Salt & Sorcery.
What Am I Doing?
I currently work with 5 of my classmates from different Game minors, forming the team: Archon. Together we are working together to create the game Aetherial, a steampunk inspired shoot em up. The work I do for my group mostly deals with coding and of course I do some designing as well!
What is Aetherial?
It is a game that takes place in the future where the planet has been overrun by aetherial creatures from another plane of existence. The Player will take on the role of a steampunk inspired flying ship to destroy the mother of all the aetherial creatures: The Leviathan, a flying whale!
Week #1 – My activities and Progress
Player Ship in the Scene
What I Have Done this Week –
Being the First week of the process for creating our game I worked on the most important part of our game: The Player Character. Currently our ship has two functions: Movement and Shooting.
How Did I Program it?
*Movement: So far I have basically assigned my player as a body that forces can act upon and the ability for the Player to push and pull that body using the WASD keys.
*Aiming: was a bit more complicated, being new to programming and not exactly understand the resources at my disposal it took me a long time to dig up exactly how to get the gun to not only follow the player but also shoot projectiles towards the mouse cursor. I used a couple of functions and vectors to point the cannon at the mouse position and centering it on the ship so it would rotate around and follow the mouse wherever it pointed allowing a 360 degree aiming zone.
*Shooting: The hardest part of this weeks work by far. It took me a ton of research and agonizing over my computer to get shots to even come out of the cannon and even when I figured that out they would come out always facing upwards no matter where the player pointed their cannon. With some help from a fellow programmer we set up several vectors which would triangulate the position of the tip of the cannon and fire harpoons that came out the right way.
Shooting can be summarized in 5 Steps:
1. Use code to discover the location of a mouse click and remember that information.
2. Create a Vector for that location that we can later use in a function.
3. Create a projectile at the desired fire location
4. Rotate the projectile so it aligns with the mouse click location.
5. Add a force to the projectile so it begins its travel to the location of the mouse click.
You projectile Spawns at the fire point and travels in the direction of the mouse clicks last known location.
Summary of my first week
Programming is hard, getting a product exactly the way you want it is much more difficult than I thought with the amount of resources at my disposal. Painstakingly looking for answers and learning on the side has netted me with more knowledge and progress on my education than I though. There were several times when my code didn’t work or when I couldn’t find a solution to my problems that I considered moving to a remote country and becoming a sheep herder.
How every coding session ends up!
Am I happy with my Work so far?
I am happy with the progress I made, but unhappy with the results of the progress.
Currently I feel as though the movement of our player ship doesn’t fit the aesthetic of our game that I imagined. I want to create an atmosphere of exploration and a sense of freedom within the movement of the ship. As of now the ship’s movement are too rigid and exact making it feel less like a flying ship on the verge of a great adventure, but instead as a static and very controlled entity within out game. To work on this I will have to research ways of making the game feel fast, while maintaining the atmosphere of a sense of adventure (if that makes sense). From a mechanics point of view I need add scripts that add a sense of floatiness and momentum to the player ship to convey the aesthetics more.
What to Expect for week 2?
Hopefully I will have a Enemy that can move and shoot + figured out how to create and destroy them within my game.
