House Wars – Dev. Post 01

I’ve started working on the serious game House Wars (name not final) a game about banks, loans, house prices and how all of those are connected.

Before I start talking about the work I’ve done I’ll talk about what the game is about. First of all: This is a serious game which means that its primary purpose is to teach and provoke people, not necessarily being fun.

Basic Premise:
Why are houses and apartments so expensive? That’s a question a lot of […]

Goals for the rest of 2015

Hi again! This’ll be quite a small update.
I’ve been on a hiatus for all summer, but I’m back in the business now.  The goals for the rest of this semester is to create a Minimal Viable Product to release to a guaranteed target audience. This means that we’ll be working on Tamarrion (if you don’t know what that is, just scroll down! There’s plenty of content) continuously, and I’ll be working with design, marketing and PR.
The goal 
Right, so my goal […]

Otto’s lines of dialouge

Now when we’re so close to the Final turn in of our game, we thought that we should make Otto talk. This feature is in the game just to tell the player of where Otto is. It is also in the game to make it more humorous. He will say stuff like “Get out of my house!”, “You should see my secret stash” and “Get your finger of my cane!”. These lines are all there to make Otto feel a […]

With a click of a button

When starting the game we want the players to be prepared. The players shouldn’t feel like they’re being thrown into the game without warning. In order to make the player prepared we had to make a menu from where the players can access the game. From the menu the players can start the game, check the high score, learn the controls, adjust the options and quit the game if they were to change their minds.
When making the menu we chose […]

UE4 shuffle array by RandomStream (C++)

I was doing a blueprint room script that would randomly spawn objects in the room. One thing led to another and I needed a way to shuffle an array of spawn points for room objects randomly (preferably in blueprints), but with a specified random seed, so that I could easily find a random order that I wanted to use and stick with it. Unreal Engine 4 has a built-in array shuffle function exposed to blueprints and randomness by seed with […]

First post in a long time!!

Last time I posted anything I talked about the Summer Project 2015 and the game Gecko Simulator I were going to create, unfortunately I had to leave the Summer Project because of various reasons (I got a summer job but I also wanted to spend time with my family in Stockholm).
I’m now back on the island again, the courses start again next week so until then I’m gonna try and relax but also repeat some things from last year, I […]

A Summer Tale

It has been a while, thanks, no you too.
The summer gave us the a nudge, making us want to tell you guys so much about our game so far!
We are still finishing up on our art, I don’t want to give anything away of course (http://puu.sh/j5sjf/a8ed655175.png), it would not go well with the lead artist (http://puu.sh/j5spa/36536faf01.png) so that’s that.
We are currently on our way to implement our unique new system !
Combos.
Combos will provide the solution of […]

Post BGP 2015 – What went wrong (part two)

Hello!
Continuing from the last post, here are the other things that went wrong with the BGP project (from my perspective at least). Note that I’ll be using the words ‘workplace’ and ‘office’ interchangeably when referring to the room that was set aside for my group to work on the project in.
Working hours & presence at the workplace
The working hours for the group were initially set, from 9:00 / 10:00 to 17:00 / 18:00 (some flextime was allowed). This would have […]

Post BGP 2015 – What went wrong (part one)

Hello!
I think I’ve been pushing this in front of me long enough now. This will be a bit uncomfortable for me to write about, but it needs to be done. Hopefully I can help someone avoid at least some of the mistakes that I and my group made during this project.
Lone programmer
The first thing I’d like to bring up is the fact that I was the only programmer on the team for most of the project as the only other […]

Post BGP 2015 – What went wrong (prelude)

Hello all!
As you might have guessed by now the BGP project is over and it was, unfortunately, a failure. This is especially frustrating when considering the fact that it might well have been successful if we had one or two more weeks to complete it, but deadlines are deadlines. I will try to outline what I believe to be the main reasons the project was unsuccessful.
There is quite a lot to cover so I will divide this into several posts. The […]

A lot of stuff have happend.

So it’s been three weeks since my last blog post and a lot of things happened.
The first week where i planned on working on the web server i actually did work, and at a decent speed at that, however i began having issues connecting to my server. For some reason I was completely unable to connect to my web server from a browser. This went on into the next week as well where I reworked a lot of the server […]

Thoughts on AI programming

One course that I had during this spring semester was called Game Programming V, where the main focus was on AI theory and programming.
There was a lot of new theory during this course, but it was useful nonetheless. It covered both simpler for of AI like path-finding (using A* and similar techniques) and decision trees as well as more complex forms of AI like neural networks. This is a lot to talk about in just one blog post, but if […]