Resurrection
|
Perhaps it’s about time to resurrect this blog. There are several reasons to this, but the most pressing one is that I won’t finish the current course (5SD033, “Game Development – Introduction”) if I don’t post blog posts. Might be good to present what I’m currently doing aswell. At this moment, me and the rest of group 7 (aka The Ladybugs, consisting of myself, Tomas Lindell, Malin Lundqvist, Andreas Calmius, Måns Löf and Ludwig Lindståhl) are working on a space shooter. These games were to be made based on the concepts our classmates made during the fall. The concept we picked was Suit ‘em Up, where you run around in a bug-infested suit, in an attempt to cleanse it from the bugs. It is intended to be an introduction to the space shooter genre. As for the contents of these posts, we are supposed to “pick something you worked on, and write a blog about it.”, which is exactly what I’m going to do. Last week, I did the preliminary balancing on the various creatures in the game. I did this by creating 2 tables, one for the “general” characters, and one for the bosses. Then I thought long and hard about the design of the characters, and then randomly plug in numbers that seemed “fair enough”, keeping the strengths and weaknesses in mind. I ended up with this: 
The resulting spreadsheet, masterfully crafted in Word. I guess the above picture might need some explaining. Barney is the player controlled character. He moves around in the suit, and tries to kill the bugs. Bugger is one of the two trash mobs, with Grubling being the second one. Buggers are flying, melee bugs. Due to them being melee, they need to feel sturdy and do a bit more damage per hit than the Grublings, to get the player to feel the need to kite them around. However, they are also quite quick, but Barney can still (barely) outrun them. Grubling are the second trash mob. They are small larvae who spit balls of goo at you from a distance. The gooballs travel slightly faster than Barney moves, but are hopefully not fast enough to be undodgeable. The gooballs continue in one direction until they go offscreen, where they then disappear. To offset them being range, they have lower health and damage than the Buggers, and also move slower. However, they attack faster, which means more balls of goo to dodge, especially when you accidentally pull two of them. The second table is the bosses. I don’t really want to go into details on the specific encounters at this point, especially since they might change heavily depending on if we can actually implement the AI for them in a timely fashion. I might make a post on it another time. The first two bosses, Grubby McGrub and Ben Bugger are positioned at the left and right sleeve, respectively. They can be killed in any order, and when they both die, the final boss Mothgomery spawns near the middle of the All of the above will most likely change based on the feedback we receive during playtesting, but hopefully we can keep this general pattern.
|
