Blog post 4: Lack of motivation

Hello there.
This week I am going to talk about the biggest issue that my team, team Troll, has got in our development of the game “Depth”. That problem is lack of motivation. This problem have slowly been creeping up on the members of my team, the further we have gotten with the game and the closer we get to the next course. This was brought up by one of the graphics in my team and the other members agreed that […]

Creating a level manager, kinda…

Once again, I’m Guy Dimor from team Wendigo, and today I’ll write about how I created a maybe-sorta-kinda-not really level manager.
Before the beta playtests, there were some things still missing from our game, not the least of which being an actual series of levels. Instead we had a randomly generated endless mode, which didn’t have much replayability and did not have any progression. We knew this would pose a problem with the playtesters, as this was no longer alpha and […]

Week 4 – Comment

Group G, Felix Rham
I think you have managed to convey what you have worked the last weeks really well. You are clear with bad things as well as good things, which is nice since we all can learn from each other’s mistakes.
I like that you showcased the assets and animations with a clear background and not in game that would have made it harder to see what you were writing about.
You have also described well how you did thing. For […]

Level Design

This week I have focused a lot on QA (Quality Assurance) to figure out balancing issues and overall small adjustments to the game that we can fine tune after the Beta deadline hits. So, everything from the feel and flow of the game to the monster’s attack speed. As you can imagine there is a lot you can finetune even in a small game.
This also goes hand in hand with the other task I have this week. Update our level/map […]

Blog Post 4 – Pine Trees

Time to talk about something else than bugs! and scrum
Since Beelonging is set in a forest we of course had to have some trees, since it would look pretty empty otherwise. Me and Natali (the other artist in our group) planned some background assets that we then split between us. I decided to make pine trees, since I think they’re beautiful and because we decided to have a North European taiga forest in our game. We thought that featuring such […]

Harpoon the Goon

This week I have been working on a few different things, but one of the main things I have done is set a limit on the use of the harpoon. In our game, Umibozu, the player must use their harpoon to kill enemies but should be careful to avoid shooting vital power-ups.
We aim to facilitate ‘mystery’ in Umibozu, by forcing the player to use their floodlight to uncover potential enemies/power-ups etc. (which all share the same sprite while covered by […]

Time to make a Tutorial!

This week, my work has been dedicated towards creating a tutorial level for our game. It’s not part of our original level, but an optional level that the player can run if it’s the first time playing the game. All the instructions to controls, enemy behaviour, powerups and objectives isn’t necessarily restricted to only the tutorial, but it can help the player get a feeling for the actual gameplay.

The reason for me to choose this as my priority number one […]

Post #4 – Introducing features to the player

What?
A tutorial level, meant to teach players how to use the various functions of the game.

Why?
After a lot of playtesting we have found one thing to be consistant, players rarely comprehend all the abilities they can use, when said abilities are best to use and how to figure out when they are able to do so. Hence the need for a tutorial level seemed apparent to us (the members of group siren).
How?
We gathered the group at Campus Gotland (Uppsala University) and […]

YOU DIED- 5SD064 HANNA AHO LIND

This sprint I was tasked with making a “death” or “losing” sprite of our submarine, for when it has been hunted down by the giant fish. I decided to go for three different aproaches but with the same teqnicues. I choosed the same brushes and decided to go with a theme of red- to symbolise and communicate danger.
It boiled down to these three concepts, one where I black out all the colour of the submarine and replace the blue light, […]

Adding Animations

This week most of my time was spent on adding animations to the different enemy types as well as the Behemoth Cannon to give the game more life and to also give some visual feedback to the player when he does certain actions or when certain things happen on screen.


In order to add an animation, I first get a sprite sheet from my artists that has each frame of that animation in an equally sized cell, I then […]

The Animation of Barry the Sqrrl

Have you ever wondered how cartoon characters seem to be alive? Well, of course you have and I am pretty sure you know how animators made it happen, but in case you don’t know how animators “give life” to your favorite characters, for example in 2D animation, they literally draw objects and characters on paper or in the computer and then position them in frames to create the animation.
There’s different kinds of animations like 2D or 3D, and different ways […]

Insight #4 – Lasers & Animation

As explained in Insight #2 – Iteration, in our adaptation of the Behemoth game concept we decided on a military sci-fi setting with dystopian and cyberpunk elements through an arcade art style. Having this as our aesthetic cornerstone, we gravitated towards energy fields and lasers when we designed the visual representation of the ship’s dynamic elements; for example, we replaced the original explosive cannonball-like projectile with a powerful energy burst akin to that of an ‘energy attack’ as seen in […]