Dev Blog 4, Level Wrapping

This week I will be writing about how our design goals and ways to achieve those goals impacted the way our levels are implemented.
The camera system in our game is top-down, and the camera controls the pace at which the player progresses. The camera moves upwards on the screen at a set pace. Side to side however, the player is free to move as they wish. The goal with this design is to give a feeling of exploration and freedom, […]

1st of March

Our team member from the Game Design minor finished constructing the overall layout of our level earlier this week. It consisted of large horizontal wall sections, placed in such a way as to create different paths for the player to travel. He then handed it over to me so that I could build the actual level using all of our art assets. It quickly became apparent during the process of placing assets and decorating the level that it’s very beneficial […]

Learning about Sound Design and Feedback

Besides my role as programmer I am also the lead sound designer at our game project aetherial. I felt comfortable picking that role since I did have some experience in music (I played cello for about 10 years) and because I already had some very minor experience in editing and creating sounds digitally. However learning an entire software is no small task and I am still learning new stuff every day about FL Studio, which is the software I chose […]

Letters

Hello and welcome to another one of my blog posts! Today I will write about an art task once more.
This week I have taken some art assets to work on. One of them is the main menu of our game. To be more precise I have been designing the game’s title – Aetherial, and also choosing font and color for main menu words (like “Start the hunt”, “Exit”, etc. – See picture 1)
I have always liked working with letters, or […]

Designing A Difficult Enemy In Aetherial

I Will Blog A Bit About What We Call The Sky-Ray

What was the idea?
The idea behind the Sky-Ray was an interpretation of what we thought was a hard enemy in the concept document. 
And we wanted to create something that would be a bit more difficult than our two enemies that i have mentioned in my previous blog posts. 
We wanted to have a menacing enemy that would really convey a big threat, and what we discussed about […]

Blog Post #4 – Pew pew!

As we near closer to Beta I have been busy filling out the rest of the sounds for Behemoth as new abilities and power-ups are added to the game. During our last play-test, there were some requests for “big” sounds like a huge explosion when you fire your “super mega awesome wave” (name pending) which is a special ability that destroys all enemies on the screen. Since this is such a powerful ability, it should have a powerful sound. For […]

Blog 4

Squids and their movement
So this week I will go back a bit and take a look at how I designed the second enemy in our game, the giant squid. I will as per usual attempt to reflect and reason a bit around the decisions i made while working on the squid.
So for this game revolving around mystery and uncertainty I wanted the an enemy that reflects those feelings. Now, while the Great white I worked on previously is a fitting […]

Parallaxing & Background

When sitting in a car or train and looking at the fence by the road, the poles of the fence passes so quickly, the trees at the side of the road as well. Things further away seems to stay longer and you have more time to look at them.
When creating a 2D game we want to have the illusion of having a 3D space, even though it is not. Having different “layers” of background objects moving at different speed gives […]

Something wicked this way comes

While finishing up for the Beta, I have been working on the most prominent track in the game: the boss’ theme song.
Our game, based on the Umibozu concept document, features a large sea monster as its final boss. While the original concept document drew heavily from Japanese culture in both art and mythos, we decided to go a different route with a steampunk setting instead. So, instead of having the ”Umibozu” (sea monster from Japanese folklore), we have the scary […]

Start Screen

Hello reader 
The artefact I have been working with this week is the start screen. The start screen is what welcomes players to the game and acts as an intermediate between starting the game and playing it. It also gives the player the option to exit the game and has a button to another menu that hold some optional things to press like a button to see the controls and a button that opens the settings. 
The way I made the start screen was by creating a new unity scene that the start menu is supposed to be in. I add some unity buttons that are going to be the buttons you use to get around. The […]

4. Would you like some sounds with that shooting?

Hello once again, in this weeks blog post I will be talking about the tricks and methods I used when finding the sound effect for the submarine shooting. What is a sound effect? A sound effect is trying to recreate the feeling one would get when seeing the real object.
When it comes to my groups game, just going on the internet and searching shooting sound effect doesn’t really cut it. Since the game takes place underwater, a regular shooting sound […]

Communicating function through visual means

Our group’s version of Friendship Down features an antagonist, robotic species that make up the game’s enemy units.  For reasons of time, we had to cut any boss fights from development. Because of this, we had to make as much use of the enemy units as possible in order to provide some form of gameplay variety, as well as an escalating sense of progression over the course of the game. There are three enemy units, each with their own specific […]