Analysing a Boardgame #2

This week we chose to play and analyze the game Small World Underground, a strategy game that reminded us somewhat of last weeks game, Dust. The game is played with 2-5 players on a specific board for specific amounts of players, meaning that two players get one map and four will be playing on another map.

The goal of the game is to collect as many victory coins as possible through conquests and dominating important tiles on the map.
The gameboard consists […]

Analysing a Boardgame #1

The second year of game design has started, and with it a new task to analyze board games.
The task consists of first playing the game and then deciding the objectively worst and best sides of the game. After that we are to decide the core game system, meaning the system that the entire game revolves around, and then defining the objects, functions and the properties, behavior and relationships that is this game.
And then we choose the subjectively most interesting system […]

Analysing a Boardgame #1

The second year of game design has started, and with it a new task to analyze board games.
The task consists of first playing the game and then deciding the objectively worst and best sides of the game. After that we are to decide the core game system, meaning the system that the entire game revolves around, and then defining the objects, functions and the properties, behavior and relationships that is this game.
And then we choose the subjectively most interesting system […]

Making a Game Part 6 – Reconfigurable Hotkeys

Hello and welcome to this second to last blog post on the makings of this game.
So, this week I had some trouble deciding on which artifact to post about as I have been mostly fixing some issues and various bugs in the game, such as having no ammunition if you restart the game after winning and adding a small high-score system to motivate the player not to kill the guards as you now get a ninja-reward if you manage to complete the […]

Making a Game Part 6 – Reconfigurable Hotkeys

Hello and welcome to this second to last blog post on the makings of this game.
So, this week I had some trouble deciding on which artifact to post about as I have been mostly fixing some issues and various bugs in the game, such as having no ammunition if you restart the game after winning and adding a small high-score system to motivate the player not to kill the guards as you now get a ninja-reward if you manage to complete the […]

Making a Game Part 5 – The Options Screen

This week I made the options-screen for our game, something that I thought would be pretty straight forward but actually turned out to be pretty difficult.
After creating the state using the framework from the other states I made the button in the Main Menu-state lead into the Options and then started working on some sliders for volume-control, the sliders image was skilfully made by yours truly and is really a pure work of art:

In reality though, it looks awful […]

Making a Game Part 5 – The Options Screen

This week I made the options-screen for our game, something that I thought would be pretty straight forward but actually turned out to be pretty difficult.
After creating the state using the framework from the other states I made the button in the Main Menu-state lead into the Options and then started working on some sliders for volume-control, the sliders image was skilfully made by yours truly and is really a pure work of art:

In reality though, it looks awful […]

Making a Game Part 4 – Animations

This week has been mostly making this operate again when merging our codes (Git Hub did not cooperate) so as to have a functional game for the beta.
One of the things that needed a bit changing were the animations seeing as they operated as a substitute for the sf::Sprite instead of together with it, meaning that when we tried to make a gameobject-hierarchy it would become problematic since not every object will be animated.
The first solution we tried was to […]

Making a Game Part 4 – Animations

This week has been mostly making this operate again when merging our codes (Git Hub did not cooperate) so as to have a functional game for the beta.
One of the things that needed a bit changing were the animations seeing as they operated as a substitute for the sf::Sprite instead of together with it, meaning that when we tried to make a gameobject-hierarchy it would become problematic since not every object will be animated.
The first solution we tried was to […]

Making a Game Part 3 – Shooting

So, here we are again.
This week I chose to try implementing animations and shooting, both of which being pretty big additions to a game.
However, this post will only be about the shooting, leaving the animations for another day.
First thoughts about shooting: bullets need to be their own object and only spawned/despawned when actually in use, so as to not cause unnecessary performance-drops.
The bullets also need to be associated with the player, the enemies and the walls, so an efficient way […]

Making a Game Part 3 – Shooting

So, here we are again.
This week I chose to try implementing animations and shooting, both of which being pretty big additions to a game.
However, this post will only be about the shooting, leaving the animations for another day.
First thoughts about shooting: bullets need to be their own object and only spawned/despawned when actually in use, so as to not cause unnecessary performance-drops.
The bullets also need to be associated with the player, the enemies and the walls, so an efficient way […]

Making a Game Part 2 – AI

This week I chose one of the more difficult artifacts on the sprint planning: making the enemies chase and then kill the player.
My first thoughts about this was to just make the player “lose the game” if he collided with any of the patrolling guards.
Now, instead of doing a collision-check I made a function that returns the distance between the player and a guard (cycling through all the guards in their Update()-method):

Which basically just does a pythagorean calculation and […]