Flight of the Bees

Hello again!
Fredrik here again and this week I have mostly worked on how to make the movement in our game feel better. This is because, based on the feedback we got from the alpha testing, we decided during a sprint planning meeting that the current movement we had was very lackluster. From the testers we had some people saying that our player could have been anything else and it would still have made as much sense as a bee from […]

Blog post 2: Music

Hello there.
This week I’m going to talk about the process of finding the right music for the game “Depth”.
Because the game we are creating is supposed to be a survival horror game, the music is very important for the setting. Though we cannot just take any horror music we can find. Since most of the songs we could find are very slow paced, it will not fit with the theme of “last leg”, which means “RUN!”.
For the process of trying […]

Playtesting

Playtesting – A Method of Reflection
This week we have been executing a playtest with our fellow peers in the Game Design course in hopes of getting an outside perspective on our game. As we now have an Alpha build, we wanted some insight into the controls and the user friendliness of it.
Our method was simple. We set out a computer running our game, we had one person documenting the behaviors the witnessed from the player and one person asking them […]

Lycanthrope: Spider Animation (WIP)

Hello! My name is Mattias Borgqvist and I am currently working on a shoot em up game based on the concept document “A game of beelonging” by group Ouroboros.
This week I have been continuing working on our spider enemy but this time I have been focusing on the the animation part instead of just trying to get the final looks of the spider. Now I have to make the spider move instead of just being stationary which can look quite […]

Blog Post #2: Damage Sounds

During this very busy week I have been thinking over the sounds I need to make for this sprint plan and desperately trying to find time to do so. As I finally got some time to myself this afternoon, I managed to put together the start to some damage sounds. I have been considering carefully how I will make the sounds of damage reflect the art style and the emotional impact I want them to invoke. Since our Behemoth ship […]

Lighting in Umibozu

Context
The game concept my team and I are developing features a cone of light that reveals elements of the game world as its core mechanic. In the original concept the cone originates from the player’s avatar and and rotate automatically and the player can toggle this spot light on and off. In addition a halo of light surrounds the player, extending over a shorter distance than the light cone. Having the light cone on also depletes the player ship’s battery, […]

Game Design-group Lycanthrope AI Bees part 2 I’m firing my Lasers

Hello, today I will write about how I upgraded my AI bees for our game. Our AI bees relied on circle colliders, but now they use line casting for detecting all kind of things, but mainly the distance to the player and if a point in the formation is empty. This new system will allow our bees to react dynamically to the player, the honeycomb formation, and the different positions the bees will have in the idle state. I made this […]

Working in a small team

Hi everyone!
In this post I’d like to say something more about working in a 4 men squad, fairly small-sized Scrum group. Our set up is: 2 people in graphic department, one programmer and me as a producer. According to Scrum framework, a team should be cross-functional, which means knowledge of all the aspects of development and design is available to the team. In reality, each of us has little to no prior experience with our minors, so in order to […]

Swimming in the Right Direction

Lately I’ve been working on a swimming shark that is going to be used for two different school projects. It is one of two animations I’m doing for an animation assignment, and it is also going to be the animation of one of the enemies in the game I am making for another course. The biggest challenge when working with this animation has been to balance the different criteria that this animation needs to fulfill. I want it to look […]

2nd post – Preparing for the Alpha presentation

This week our team will have the Alpha presentation, which is the major milestone in our “Shoot em up” project. During the presentation we will need to present a chosen concept and explain how we interpreted it. We will also have to present 3 things we are satisfied with the project, and 3 things that we had problems with.
While preparing for this presentation, it was easy to come up with problems we were facing when working with the Alpha features. […]

Designing the Level

Hello Everyone!
This week our team Bugbear decided that we should probably have level design for our game Umibozu. Because right now our game have random enemy spawns, and random power-ups spawns. You just float around on an endless sea and meeting the enemies as you ”progress” forward. It works with game we choose, sure, but we thought we could make our game even better if made a level design. It also makes it easier to make in a sense when […]

Dev Blog 2, The Harpoon Projectile

This is the second part of my blog detailing what I have worked on while creating the game Umibozo together with my team, based on the designed created by another team.
In Umibozo the player controls a ship equipped with a harpoon. While usually used for fishing, it proves particularly useful when monsters start attacking. In this blog post I will talk about how we designed and implemented the mechanics of the harpoon.
The original design explained the harpoon as a simple […]