Creating an unfogettable ambient

Introduction
Creating a lasting experience for the player that convey mystery and excitement yet is not too intrusive or frightening is probably the decider whether our Umibōzu will succeed or crash and burn. While a lot of atmosphere and ambient can be build up with music and sound cues, having believable, coherent and frankly spoken “beautiful” art is arguably the most important factor. Last week, I already touched upon the water in Umibōzu and my aesthetic vision for the project. In […]

Creating a level design with bugged enemies

I recently had the pleasure of making the level design for our game so that we had something proper to show during our alpha presentation, which went good and all if it hadn’t been for one tiny detail, the one and only enemy in the game was killing it self with its own projectile.
Making the level design in of itself was not a hard task per-se but more of a time-consuming, brainstorming and shape making task. Placing obstacles in an […]

One frustrating asset

Hi! Welcome to my second blog post
Today I will write about a task from previous week, (because it is more interesting to write about art assets than alpha presentation preparation that I did this week)
This asset has to do with the health and aether bar (which I wrote about in my first blog post) in a way that this is a power up indication animation! And the animation happens beside the bars. This animation will activate when you, as the […]

Enemy Waves Spawner

I’m going to talk something about how I created an enemy waves spawner. Before this, there were only two types of enemies come out from the left screen in our game, and the enemies just keep doing this forever. In a traditional “shoot ’em’ up” game, enemies always come out with different waves, for example, there is only one enemy in the first wave, then two enemies in the second wave, then maybe five enemies, and so on.
In order to […]

Level generator

For the level pattern in unity 2D games,  i could generate all enemies before hand the moment the game started. However it requires lots of memory and becomes really hard to manage, even slows down your game if the level is too long. So we should generate each GameObject dynamically, it becomes easy to manage and change.
There are plenty of tutorials online of how to design a powerful level generator with all-rounded functions. What i did in the Aetherial project […]

Insight #2 – Iteration

In this entry I will present the iterative process behind the creation of the Behemoth’s cannon and the changes that it went through from its conceptualization until its current alpha-ready state.
The concept of Behemoth called for a disproportionately large cannon as one of the cornerstones of its aesthetic. With this in mind, we decided on a military sci-fi setting with dystopian and cyberpunk elements, which resulted in a simple yet rugged and powerful design. Our main inspiration came from SNES […]

Sprint 4 – Polishing the harbor and player boat.

This week I have been tasked with polishing the habor for the starting page. Basically the idea behind it is that the harbor is the background for the main menu but also the starting location. Once the player hits play, he has control over the boat, gets indications on the controls and try the controls in the harbor before sailing away and starting his journey.
To the harbor I have added a city with vendors on the bottom so that it […]

Blog 2: Designing the enemies in Umibozu

After picking the concept for Umibozu, the game where the player travels through the fog until they encounter the mysterious entity known as Umibozu which I mentioned in the last blog, we chose to stick mostly to the concept that was chosen. That meant that we wanted to avoid any major changes in the mechanics, level layout and enemies, but there are some things that can’t be left alone and one of those were the enemies.

When designing the enemies we […]

Game Design 2: Blogpost #2, Enemy AI

For this blog I will be writing about the different AI in our game Behemoth. I am Jonathan Berggren the lead (and only) programmer of Group Siren.
In the concept document for the Behemoth game three types of enemies are described, we decided to use the exact same enemy types, although changing the way they look to fit the different artstyle we decided to have for the game. These enemies are:

The Shooter
The Kamikaze
The Spawner (that we chose to call The Carrier […]

Boss bear – About the boss fight and the design of the bears appearance.

In the game that we are making, the bees are rushing to their hive to save it from a bear that is attacking it. Completing the first level lets you play the boss fight with the bear. One of my tasks in developing the game is to design the looks of the bear and animate it.
The result: what the boss fight looks like in the game
The mechanics of the boss fight is that the bear open and closes its mouth, […]

Cannot Kill the Battery!

This week I’ve been working on a “battery”-mechanic for our group’s (Bugbear!) game “Umibōzu”. Until now, the player has been able to use the floodlights at will, which unbalances the game by making it possible to “spam” the floodlight, rendering powerups and other mechanics trivial. This is also a problem because it contradicts our aesthetic goal of “mystery”. To rectify, we decided that it is time to implement a “battery”-mechanic which shows a meter or similar, giving visual feedback, so […]

Blog Post 2 – Movement

Hello! Time for another blog post. In this post I will talk about player movement in our game. The player controls the movement with the WASD buttons. W and S are for thrust, D and A are for rotation. The player is a boat and the player can traverse the level any direction. These are the two most important things when it comes to the player movement in our game. The problem that I currently have is that the movement […]