Aetherial2D Project – Character Movement

When you try to programme a game, the first thing you are going to think about it is your main character. The most basic thing for the character which you are going to programme is movement. Movement seems like the thing easiest to programme but the most important part of a character, also it is the core of your character.
When I was doing this,  I needed to add two things to the character to be able to move him around. […]

Projection and volumetric light

This is the first Unity project I’ve been working on, not counting a few tutorials that I’ve been playing around with in the past. In order to get a proper understanding of the game engine (and when I say proper, I mean basic) I started out by spending quite some time following an online course hosted by Udemy.
I started researching camera projections and the difference between a perspective projection and an orthographic one. I drew the conclusion that a orthographic […]

Global Game jam 2018

After starting this Game Design course at Uppsala University, among the 3 game jams that I have taken part in, the last one held at the end of January was the most interesting to me. Even before taking game design course as a major, I heard a lot about these game jams where people in groups work together to make games on the same given theme. I used to think people who take part in these events were really experienced in […]

Game Design Week 6 – The Making of a Jellyfish

For my group Troll’s project – developing our take on the game concept Depth – I have this week been working on, among other things, the swimming animation of a jellyfish. Depth will, briefly put, be about a submarine navigating  an underwater cave system, and escaping a large monster that is constantly on its tail. To make the whole thing harder, the player will have to also shoot and avoid both fish and rubble. The jellyfish I have made is one […]

Game Design Week 3 – The Making of a Jellyfish

For my group Troll’s project – developing our take on the game concept Depth – I have this week been working on, among other things, the swimming animation of a jellyfish. Depth will, briefly put, be about a submarine navigating  an underwater cave system, and escaping a large monster that is constantly on its tail. To make the whole thing harder, the player will have to also shoot and avoid both fish and rubble. The jellyfish I have made is one […]

Design Meeting

As this is the first blogpost I will start with an introduction of me and the game we are developing. I’m Tim W Johansson and studying Game Design at Uppsala Univerity at Campus Gotland.
The game we are currently working on is a “Shoot em’ up”-game or SHMUP for short. And we are creating the game with the concept of our peers that’s called Umibozu where you control a ship in misty condition and your only way to see in the […]

Pixel Art

HIIIIII! Welcome to my short entry about Pixel art! 
Pixel art as implied by its name is limited to use only a few pixels when creating an artwork. the popular style has its roots in early video games when the designers were limited to 8 or 16bit graphics but it is still widely used in many platform games and RPGs.
As the Lead Artist for this project I immediately made the decision to make our game using pixel art. My main reasoning […]

5SD064 – Enemy movement visualization

Today’s post is about the movement for one of the enemies in the game Aetherial, shown to the right in the image below. Enemies in traditional Shoot’ em ups tend to move in simple predetermined patterns, not taking the player’s position into account. In Aetherial, the enemies will try to move towards the player while also moving in patterns, making them hard to hit. I’m going to employ AI techniques described in the book: Programming Game AI by Example, by Mat […]

The animation cycle of a wing span

Aka. H***.
 

The though process behind this stale monstrosity was quite simple – effiency and modability. To explain further: Being the sole artist for the team I need to create a lot of assets and templates for said assets at a relativly high speed so that I won’t lag behind our programmer. Doing the animation properly, frame by frame, would almost be a week in itself. In an attempt to save my sanity I decided to create a semi-smooth wing cycle, […]

Week #1 – Making the Player

Who Am I?
Hello! I am Marcus Ford, a 1st year student studying Game Design & Programming at Uppsala University Campus Gotland. I was Born in England, but I spent the first half of my life in Sweden and the second half in the United States, only to come back to Sweden to study partially because of the education (but mostly because of the free tuition).
Why Am I Here?
I have wanted to be a game designer for as long as I […]

5SD064-Animation-bouncing balls

This week I have been working on the assignment for 2D1 course that the students were asked to animate a cannon ball and a rubber ball bouncing from a height and coming to a stop. After watching a short tutorial video, I started making my own bouncing ball by using the animation function in photoshop. There are four core principles when making animation in 2D space:
Solid, key drawing/pose = what happens
Timing = when it happens
Spacing = how it happens
Squash and stretch = the deformation […]

First Post: Perspective

My team and I are making a “shoot’em up” game in unity. I am writing this blog to try and talk about some of the issues we come across while developing the game. In our game, right now called Umibōzu, the player takes control of a fisherman out fishing in the ocean when a mysterious mist envelops the ship and weird creatures and other things start to appear. The player is tasked with escaping from the mist.
One of the things […]