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 […]

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 […]