First blog post on Draxl’s journey

Hello! I am Christofer Mattsson the lead coder in team Leviathan. Our prodject right now is under ten weeks make a game called draxl’s journey.

This is my first blog post on this project so I am going to explain what the game is and our goals with it.

Draxl’s is a casual space shooter where you play as a spaceship that explore the beautiful space. But other civilizations are scared of you, so when you get close to their planet they surround you with an electric fence. That is where the game begins and you as a player need to take out the enemy ships without shooting them. So you using a shield to reflect their projects back at them. When you have damage enough enemies the ships that holds up the fence is starting to get in and try to stop you, and that weaking the shield. When all of the ships is gone from the fence you are free to continue exploring the magical world called space.

Our goal with this game is.

• Small but very well done game.

We took a small game so we really could focus on doing it well, and if we got time add more and fun stuff.

• A game that everyone can play, old, young, gamer, non gamer, color blind, deaf.

We are aiming to a player around 30-50 years old, that don’t play a lot of games. So we are trying to make a game with a small narrative that tells itself and easy to play and easy to get into. We are also trying to make the game playable by color blind and deaf people. So we are using a lot of blue and orange/yellow because that color blind can distinguished from each other. We are also making visual notifications for everything that we going to have in a notifications for, so that deaf get the same information as a player that have sound.

• A game that is available to easily be ported to a mobile or other touch device.

We want the game to be available to be ported to a touch device. So we are going for minimal hud so it doesn’t block the hole screen, and small amount of inputs for making it easy to play on a mobile.

This week.

We are now in the fourth week and this week i have mostly worked on fixing bug that we saw under the playtesting, and fixing small thing before the alpha hand-in.
On playtesting we got a lot of feedback on the hitbox and collisions. I started going through all the hitboxes and made them a lot better. On the shield we had a edge collider, that gave us problem that is was really hard to get the hitbox symmetrical. So I changed the collider to a polygon collider, and that made it a lot easier and better. I also made it thicker and that fixed the problem that the projectile sometime moved through the shield.  

The second thing I did this week was to code our first power up. The power up being that you get two more shield for some seconds. First I needed to figure out how to make the enemy to drop the power up at random. That I solved quickly by using “Random.range(float min, float max)”. Random.range returns a random float between min and max. Then I just needed to check if value that came out was between  1.0 and 2.0 and if it was then drop the power up. Then came the most annoying part. The collision between the avatar and the power up drop. I had a lot of problems in that area mostly because the build in “OnCollision2D” method didn’t work as I thought. I tried to and tried but every time the avatar never collided with the power up drop. I tried to have it on trigger and use the “Ongtrigger2D” method. It still didn’t work so i tried to put a rigedbody2D on the power up drop. I thought that you didn’t need to have a rigidbody to have a collision between two gameobjects, so I started to ask  around and everyone said that you didn’t need a rigidbody. Then I tried again without the rigedbody and it didn’t work. So I gave up and went with the rigedbody. After that it was simply to activate the gameobject that was the extra shields and then we had our first power up.                               

About Christofer Mattsson

2016 Programming

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