An over-whale-ming amount of whales

Yet another week spent dealing with whales, this time in the form of animation. A couple of weeks ago we made animations for our graphics class, and I made the choice to animate the boss of our game – Aetherial. In our version of the game, that boss is a whale inspired by Moby Dick, a design choice that can be read about here. I of course also made the animations because they were a requirement for the game, […]

Development blog 4: Animation and boss

Good morning all. As one of the artist in group Zombie. I am excited to present you our 4th development blog- the animation and the boss. Now you already know how were the enemies and playable character designed, it is time for me to introduce you to the animations and boss in our Exploration game – Umibozu.
Enemies in Umibozu need animations. Whenever the enemies attack, being attacked, being killed, there should be feedbacks for the players so that the player […]

5SD064 – Blog Post 4 : Dying

Death is a big part of “Depth”. When you die, and you can only die from getting eaten by the monster chasing you, you have the choice between returning to the main menu or restarting the game at the last checkpoint.
Restarting the game means that every enemy and power-up has to be removed from the scene, every enemy and power-up spawner has to be reinitialized, the player has to be teleported back to the last checkpoint (which, in “Depth”, […]

Ink.

Introduction
Creating good looking ink effects in Unity is certainly a tricky challenge, but I have throughoutly enjoyed working on it so far. I will shed some light on my thought process, what results I came up with so far and what my inkredible ambitions for the future are. So let’s dive right into it!

Research. A looot of research.
When I as the Lead Artist originally decided to go with an ink-on-paper artstyle (also known as sumi-e 墨絵 in japanese or 水墨畫 […]

More Bees, Less Bugs

Even though we are creating a game about bees, wasps and beetles, I only want bugs to appear on screen and not in my code. Unfortunately, fixing bugs is a major part of your work as a programmer and can get extremely frustrating when you can not seem to find out what is wrong.Especially after the last playtesting session there were a lot of things that needed to be fixed. For some reason, our main character or his companions occasionally […]

2018.03.01 – Maximizing your Audio budget using pitch variation

Why do we need sound?
In order to help the player enter into the magic circle, we need to consider all aspects of the game feel such as movement, visual cues, and audio feedback. Today we will be tackling the last one.
Audio helps us conveying information to the player by engaging another sense besides visual and tactile (e.g. rumble). Relaying feedback via audio, allows us to:

further immerse the player by making sure all possible sense are engaged in the universe we […]

Smoke and Mirrors

Welcome back!
Fredrik here again, and this time I will bring you a peek into the design process of the AI in my game. As the title suggests, AI is usually not what you’d think when you experience it as the player. For instance, in our game, we struggled a lot with the AI even though it’s part of the core mechanics of the game. The AI is supposed to be what achieves the aesthetic of belonging in our game. You […]

Animation cycles

Hiiiiiii!
This week I am going to write about last weeks art assignment (as I imagine many Graphics minors are). We were supposed to create at least two animation cycles of the same character, and we were encouraged to pick a character from our shoot ‘em up. Surprisingly enough, I ended up animating my beloved pink Fish (!!!!). I decided to make a death animation, idle animation and a turn-around animation.
I started with the turn-around, because I figured it would be […]

Comment on Blog Post #1

Hey duder!
Good blog! Very descriptive. I like how you explain what you were going for when doing the animation of your character, it’s helpful to know – seeing how I have a hard time animating myself. One thing you could think about though is adding more pictures! I didn’t in my blog post either, and looking at other people’s blog posts makes it apparent that it’s more informative if you do!
It would be a more interesting blog post if you […]

Comment on Blog Post #2

Hey!
Good blog, dude. I really found it interesting to gain some insight, as a graphical student, into the programming process – and I really appreciate the detail you went into, without using too much programming-jargon that I wouldn’t likely understand! It helps me in understanding how I can make things easier for my own programmer in the future.
If I had to pick on something, though – it’s that I would like to see more ways in which us graphical students […]

How to use the Animation tools in Unity

This week we were a little short on manpower since one of the members on the team is on vacation. My tasks were more focused on importing and implementing done assets into unity as well as doing animations using the animator, instead of making assets as I usually do. Thank goodness for Scrum am I right?
So here’s a workflow instructional guide on how to import sprites into unity.
The Basics

Drag and drop all your sprite sheets into the Unity folder of […]

01-03-2018

This Monday we had our first playtest since the Alpha preview. This blog post will be about lessons I learned from the feedback my group got from that testing.
At first, some of the feedback we got was quite confusing, and some downright offended me as the programmer. People were writing that the attacks didn’t work and that enemies were invincible. And I knew that just wasn’t true! But why were so many people saying the same thing? The answer came […]