A Snail Tale Update

This week has been fruitful for the snail gods.
Our lead programmer Frederick has been working on getting the mechanics on the running done, we were searching for a character that accelerates quickly and decelerates when switching sides. I believe we’ve achieved it, unfortunately, we don’t have footage yet but we will soon enough!
Our lead designer Topi has finally created the three most important pages on our concept document and it is getting sharp!
A snippet for your imagination!
“A Snail Tale is […]

BGP – Spirit Boom – Dev. Post 3

For this week I had quite a lot of work planned out, but only managed to complete a few things, namely the combat menu manager, the combat results screen, I started working how to load enemy data from files, and I was also trying to implement some animations into the combat.

The combat menu manager
The work done on the combat menu manager was mostly about polishing what had already been done to make it work better, although, this took a […]

Week 6 – Tamarrion – The Pre-Beta

Pre-Beta
This week, we had our first of two pre-beta play testing sessions (Which is great for my thesis, as I’m basing my thesis on the feedback to design decision process).
We’ve worked all week to implement as much as possible into the game. A Beta version of a game means that all FEATURES has to be implemented, and I’m happy to say that they are, and we also managed to get a lot of new assets into the the actual […]

Harakat rebooted.

Today we reworked harakat mode. By a pretty big amount programming-wise. Previously it would allow players to slow down time in order to line up a maximum of three spells and cast them all at the end, certain constellations of spells would also be able to form combination spells.
After today’s quality time with teachers we have reworked the harakat meter to contain three ‘orbs’ segments, each of these represents one charge of Harakat which is notably shorter than the earlier […]

Scrap Pirates – Big Game Project – Blog Post #4

The second game testing session was held on Friday. Most of the feedback was very positive and people seemed to enjoy the game, the only significant flaw that some playetesters pointed out was that they did not like having enemies in a puzzle game. To solve this, the game might have a setting where you can turn off enemies in the game, but hopefully the enemies will be part of the puzzles/obstacles of the game and so this will not […]

Warpers – Incremental Rotation

I’m currently taking the course Big Game Project at Uppsala University – Campus Gotland, where the goal is to have, after 10 weeks, a working vertical slice of a game which might have the potential to become a product worth selling at a later stage.

We’re now six weeks into the production of the game Warpers and this time I’ll write about a small feature called “incremental rotation” or “rotation interpolation“. Say you have a top-down character which you want […]

BGP 2015 – fifth week: Trouble with player movement.

Hello!
This week I’ve mainly been working on the player movement. I tried making it more controllable by the player. This was done by changing the direction of the rigidbody’s velocity to a forward vector multiplied by the magnitude of the old velocity. However this meant that the parts of the velocity that made up movement other than acceleration, such as jumping or strafing, also became a forward vector. As such jumping, strafing, tackling and gravity was ruined, but the […]

Big Game Project; Week 6

The week of the Pre-Beta.
In this week we had to prepare the features that needed to be present for the next week deadline and that is the Beta week, at that stage everything should be ready and done leaving the last week (week 8) for polishing only and getting rid of bugs that are present in the game.
This week we aimed at getting the main feature ready and that is casting and combining magic, this involves the control […]

Week 5

This week has been hectic to say the least, we’ve been working on a lot. In order to show the massive improvements we’ve made all together, I made a video.

For the A.I part.
I made minor changes for the first A.I by taking away the hear function and the guard target. The first enemy A.I now only sits in the shadow, waiting for you to appear in their view range and then moving into position to start attacking.
Relatively simple. There are […]

Middle of the day pre-beta post

We’ve ran into a bit of a snag right now which means i can’t start working on handling spells inside the player class until the spells have been added. Because of this and the fact that i might have to stay a bit late tonight to get everything done for tomorrow’s playtesting i’m writing a blog post in the middle of the day.
We had a slow day yesterday, the only thing i managed to commit was the player actually rotating […]

Big Game Project, Week 4

Hi,
I’m a bit late with this post but this is for week 4 of the project. So this week (previous week) I was put on handling AI so I have put the menu and HUD stuff on hold for now. So lets dive into behavior trees!

For AI we will use Unreals built in behavior tree. The behavior tree in Unreal is a very big plus for the Unreal engine because it makes this so much more […]

Arrows and black holes

A good day today but i’m beat. Starting off, we synchronized our changes in the player class, then I put the finishing touches on the stick indicators. After that we discussed how to give the player feedback when completing the input for a spell. In the end we settled for displaying an arrow on top of the indicator for a short period after completing the movement.
The thing i wrestled with most of the day was making the image on the […]