Shield activation

Hello reader
The artifact that i will be writing about this week is the shield activation. it’s one of the core thing we have in the game and it’s one script that activates one of four shields when the player gives the right input.
the script work by being on a empty gameobject that has all the shield gameobjects as children and then accesses the sprite renderer and collider on the each of the children. The Script when the game is running […]

Sky slug on the move

This week I’ve primarily been animating the first enemy for our game, Aetherial.
The design idea for our version of the sky slug, an enemy that of course was a part of the original aetherial concept document, came from a mix between our lead artist’s original idea and then some alterations by me.
The sky slug is meant to swarm the player but be fairly weak and easy to kill individually. I wanted to represent this in its design in several ways. […]

Enemy and obstacle spawning!

After creating the soundtracks I decided to create a script for spawning enemies. I chose to use C# because I have more experience with that compared to Javascript.
My approach was to create an empty game object which holds the script called “SpawnController” as a component. This will game object will be placed in the game scene since that is where the enemies will be spawned.
What the script does is spawn a random entity after a certain timeThreshold somewhere between minSpawnDuration and […]

Style-guide and pre-production

As many groups chose to develop the Behemoth concept, we felt pushed to do something different, add personality to it. We wanted to have a good answer for the question “What does your Behemoth game has that others don’t?”. Plot and art style depend on each other in our concept, because they were born together.

After deciding the plot and art-style, the latter being low-poly/origami with a sunset-like colour palette, the artists could focus on conveying as much as the story […]

Pixel Perfect in Unity

This week has been a adventure in Pixel Graphic Minutia behavior in Unity. I made some animations for the protagonist for our game, and wanted to test them out in Unity, to make sure everything was appearing and behaving as expected. This is when I saw it; the visual bug.
There are clear black lines of pixels showing up in certain frames of the animation. What makes it worse, is that it is inconsistent in that it doesn’t always appear on […]

Ray, Ray, Go Away. Come Again Some Other Day: Animating an Aether Ray

This week, I’ve been working on the animations of the ‘Aether Ray.’ I devoted the majority of my time towards the basic movement of the attacking animation where the ray fires the projectile from last week at the player. This is partly because it was more complicated than I had originally anticipated, and partially because I wanted to make sure it was ‘right.’ The ‘skeleton,’ much like our own, is the foundation upon which everything else is laid upon. If […]

Playtesting

So earlier this week (Monday 13/2) we had an Alpha playtesting workshop. Were all groups showed off to the other teams and teachers what has been made so far in the development.
During that workshop I sat as an observer to take notes and feedback about our game from the other students. What they liked about it and what they dislike and any other comments they would have.
We didn’t have a lot of sprites and mostly placeholders for the different assets. […]

Spooky tunes.

 
Last week, I decided to sit down and write some music. Umibozu, our game, is a dark and atmospheric game centred around mysteries and sea-dwelling monsters. It is also very much inspired by steampunk with gears, steam and chunky machinery through-out. So, essentially, what I was looking for was ”spooky steampunk”.
After some quick research in the field (i.e. I searched ”steampunk music” on Youtube a couple of times) I found that similar settings usually go for a Baroque or Victorian […]

The background as tool for narrative and suspense

When tailoring a game to make the player feel like a champion, you can’t just do it through a finely tuned challenged – you also need to create build-up. In Team Devourer we decided to convey feelings and mood through the use of mainly the background.
I our version we have different scenes that we use to build our narrative. These are: A sunny afternoon – used for the tutorial level.
A twilight dusk – used during the easier of our two […]

Orbiting Fishies

So last post I talked about the big fishy, so in this post I’m gonna cover the smaller, but just as important fishy, I think it’s been dubbed cave fish(y). Since I’m the programmer I won’t be talking so much about the look, but more about the movement and “AI”.
Smashing!
An Early choice I made was to have the fish very interactable and leave the door open for more gameplay dynamics, so I wanted the cave fish to be fully physics […]

When things don’t go according to plan

Welcome back! This weeks post will be about some of the issues and struggles I have experienced while coaching my team as a scrum master, and how I plan on resolving these issues. It might be a bit dry, so I apologize in advance.
The members of the project I am currently in charge of have during these past few weeks had massive issues with successfully delivering on the tasks that they had picked during our sprint planning sessions. Each sprint […]

Dev Blog #2 -The UI

This week I wanted to talk about our UI, which mainly consists of the health and aether bars.
First iteration.
When we thought about how we would design the UI we wanted to do it “portrait style”, but since the player avatar is a ship and not a person we chose to portray the bow of the ship along with its figurehead. Because we needed to do a lot of work during the last sprint and we only have one artist on […]