2018.02.15 – Enemy follow/move towards Player in a 2D Environment (NOT Pathfinding!)

Topic: How to create a basic “chasing” A.I. (i.e. stupid zombie like )
Why this is NOT pathfinding!
Simply put pathfinding implies obstacle avoidance, which this method doesn’t do. In other words, using the method described below, your enemies will be running head first into obstacles and do so until they are killed or they are destroyed.
Why it is a working placeholder solution for our game?
Considering the enemies in this game are wedding-attendees who transformed into zombie-like demons, the player expects […]

the role of a Lead Artist

Hiiiiiiiiiiii!
Today I would like to discuss the role of a Lead Artist (from here on referred to as LA) as I have implemented it during my work with Depth.
Our group (Ettin) has two graphic designers (blessed), so it was not a clear choice who should take on the role as LA. Since there were only one of each other minor in the team, we reasoned that the ”extra” artist would be Lead Sound Designer. Truthfully, I don’t recall exactly what […]

Lighting effects in Unity

I’m Guy Dimor, lead coder for team Wendigo, and today I’ll write about my journey into the wonderful world of lighting, Unity, and the combination thereof.
After the alpha playtests, my group decided that our immediate priorities are the implementation of the ‘fog mechanic’, concealing the true nature of game objects, and lighting effects, to add to the atmosphere of the game and greatly enhance the player’s experience.
Once I was done with the aforementioned fog mechanic, which involved using sprite masks […]

Powering up the Power up – Blog post 2: 20180215

So – this week is Alpha week – and my post will describe my reasoning concerning the detailed design of the power up.
The game that we are creating in my team is named “Aetherial” in the original concept document and the main objective for you as a player is to hunt and kill the big whale. Like a Moby Dick story in the sky you could say.
Early in this course, on the very first design meeting I called for, we […]

Making some sound

For this week, I have been working on the background soundtrack for Umibozu. Since the game we are aiming to create is supposed to be uncomfortable and mysterious, music wasn’t necessarily something we wanted. Instead I decided to try and keep the soundtrack somewhat ambient, with the odd uptick in certain sounds. I encountered some issues with saving the project in Audacity (the music editor I use). Eventually I managed to fix it, but this took up a significant amount […]

The main menu as a narrative tool

Friendship Down’s original concept document provides basic narrative direction: while on a peaceful mission, the crew of the spacefaring vessel The Friendship is abruptly attacked by a hostile alien race. The crew (a squad of friends) is forced to abandon their ship using escape pods, and then land on an unfamiliar world where they must fend off their attackers and find a means of escaping the planet. This basic storyline was intended to be communicated through an introductory cutscene, showing […]

Second Post: Mist and UI

I want to do some things that I do not feel I did properly last time. First, I wish to introduce myself, my team, and the project we are working on in more detail.
My name is Adam Olsson, I study game design and programming at Uppsala university campus Gotland. I am currently, together with my team called team Zombie, in the middle of an assignment to make a simple shoot’em up based on a concept document that was written by […]

The boaty look, from concept to end result

15/02/18
When it came to the decision of the player avatar it was the main goal to figure out how to make it look and feel boaty enough.
For the movement of the boat we decided it should feel slow and heavy. That had to be shown in the design of the boat as well.

Reference time
Looking at fishing boats the first design was being made. Rounded edges small and fragile was the first thought on how it should look like. We […]

15th of February – Implementing Art into Unity

This week has been all about implementing the art assets into the actual game, which is built in the Unity game engine. What I’ve learnt from this experience is that making something look good in your Photoshop document isn’t quite the same as making it look good in the game. A tree might look very pretty on its own, but that might change in the context of trying to create a level using that tree. Suddenly, it had to work […]

Oskar Karlsson Game dev – Health Bar code

I am Oskar Karlsson the lead programmer for the Archon group and we are working on the game Aetherial. For this week I have worked on the GUI code. The GUI includes health bar and a Aether bar. And during this sprint our groups prime goal was to get the beta requirements done and a simple GUI was one thing that was needed.
The GUI code for the health of the player is needed in this game because the Concept document […]

Play-Test Survey

This weeks task for me has been to analyse the data gathered from the play-test session that took place in the beginning of this week. The data was gathered from a survey that the testers would answer after they had tried out the gameplay, which listed questions regarding some of the aspects we wanted critiqued.

The survey included score ratings from 1 to 10 and some more elaborative questions where the player could describe the experience more individually and detailed.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Our scrum-master […]

Blog2

Japanese boats and the Sea
For this blog the goal is to describe the process coming up with a design for the boat, and then drawing said design. I will also provide some reasoning and reflection regarding the design
So what does a Japanese boat look like? Since the Japanese theme were one of the things that I personally liked the most about the concept, I felt like it was important to make the design as similar to the boats used in […]