Week one first post

Hi, my name is Måns Möller. I’m a first year student at campus Gotland, studying game design graphics, and this is my blog, dedicated to following and documenting some of the process of creating the game that me and my team are working on. The game is based on a design document created by another team during a previous course last year who named this game: Mermaid river.

This week I’ve been working on a few of the enemies for the game. One of them being the jellyfish. The jellyfish is intended to swim up and down in a somewhat random pattern
in order to act as a sort of road block for the player. While it’s goal isn’t to actively attack the player, it will do damage to him/her if they bump in to each other.
Not that much thought went into the original design of the jellyfish. Since at the point when i drew it we were not a hundred procent certain regarding how we wanted it to function and what role it would have in the game.

At first we planned to have the jellyfish being able to swim towards the left end of the screen as is the case of most enemies of the game. Later we decided to let be more of a passive enemy and have it swim around in a more random pattern. In the end though, we went ahead and made it so the jellyfish would only swim up and down. We did this partially because we wanted it to act as a sort of movable obstacle more than an active enemy and partially because this would let us save time when animating the jellyfish and it’s death. This because if we want the death animation to be ”directional” (meaning that it’s visible that the jellyfish is hit from one direction because it is pushed towards the opposite direction from the impact of a projectile) it would result having to make at least three different animations so that the animation would match the direction the jellyfish is currently swimming in. The gif bellow is the unfinished animation.

Another function that called for visible change in the graphic design of the jellyfish was the fact that we wanted it’s ”tentacles” to be electric and cause damage to the player if he/she were to hit them with the projectile, meaning that the jellyfish can only be killed by hitting it’s top part. This resulted in the need to make it clear to the player that the tentacles were dangerous. So in order to achieve this we changed the colors up a bit and made a sort of ”electric effect” to play on top of the jellyfish.

Though it still isn’t finished I’m pretty confident the end result will do for now.

About Måns Möller

2015 Graphics

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