Big Game Project – Post 1

The second year project that is set to be displayed at the Gotland Game Conference (GGC) has started production, and with that progress blogs every week until the big day, this being the first.
The project is done in teams and my team, called Team GG (The GG stands for Gravity Grind which was the name of the concept) consists of:
Jonas Lundgren as the Producer and Lead Programmer (https://enfisk1994.wordpress.com/)
Laban Melander as the Lead Designer (https://labanmelander.wordpress.com/)
Valdemar Ribbing as the Lead […]

Big Game Project, Week 2 – GUI

Hi, New week == new blog post.
At the beginning of this week I migrated all the gui stuff I did previous week into the real project. I had to do some tweaks here and there to make it all come together.
I added functionality in most the gui objects so they hold an image behind all buttons and stuff. So when our talented graphical artists have time to make textures and nice art to the gui I can just slap […]

Week three, Big Game Project

Animations in Unreal Engine (3D)
Note: This article assumes basic knowledge about the unreal engine 4 framework, including Blueprints.
Unreal uses state machines to power their animation system in their latest engine, as of 2015. They use a visual editor to set up the state machine, at the creators disposal are two different node types. There is the State node and the Conduit node.

Conceptually, it is best to think of a state as just an organized portion of an AnimGraph that we know the […]

Scrap Pirates – Big Game Project – Blog Post #1

Introduction – The Course & the Game Concept
Big Game Project is a course for the second year game design students’ at Uppsala University – Campus Gotland.  There are three requirements for to get a passing grade in the course; weekly blog posts, a game project and a post mortem report in the end of the course. The game project will be designed and developed in teams of various sizes. In the weekly blog posts I will share some of the work […]

Logical gymnastics

No blog post yesterday since i didn’t have any noticeable success so it didn’t feel worth it to write one.
Today i finished the input system for the spells, the idea behind the system is fairly simple; check if the stick is in* one of 9 specified positions*, return that position’s assigned number and place it into an array of Integers*. Then compare the array with the arrays included in the spells available to the player*, if they match then the player […]

Blogpost no.7 : Extra

Tjenare!
Som extra blogginlägg så ska jag berätta om en mindre artefakt som jag arbetade med under tiden jag satt och funderade på hur jag ska skulle lösa problem på andra artefakter jag arbetade med. Den här artefakten är inte svår eller jobbig att arbeta med och därför passade den perfekt för att öka självförtroendet och för att inte fastna i samma tankemönster som man lätt kan hamna i när man funderar på att lösa ett problem.
Det jag då arbetade med […]

Big Game Project: Scrap Pirates. Week 1-3

Hellooo…
It has been almost half a year since my last post but now it is time to start posting again and a new course begun three weeks ago, Big Game Project. It is just as it sounds, we are to create a game during this course and eventually show it off at Gotland Game Conference in late May this year.
The joined the group Sprocket with the game Scrap Pirates. Scrap Pirates is a Metroidvania style exploration/platformer with a focus on […]

Tamarrion – Learning game engine functionality (Unity 4.6 Graphical User Interface)

In the current game project that I’m involved with I am constructing menus and other Graphical User Interface (GUI) using Unity version 5.0.
In this post I will describe my initial process of learning the User Interface (UI). I will suggest adjustments to my process since I do not believe that it was efficient.
I started out by trying to find directions on how to create GUI-elements in code by searching the web. I found help and created healthbars.
When showing the healthbar code to my fellow […]

Week 2/3 – Tamarrion – God Powers!

Hi again!
I’m back to talk a bit about the progress of our new game, Tamarrion.
I missed last weeks progress update, so I’ll try to be a bit more thorough this week!
These last two weeks has been all about creating a functioning prototype where we, the development team, is able to test out features and functionality. Examples of this would be the characters abilities/spells and the bosses abilities.
We’ve been focusing on making sure that all base functionality is implemented before […]

Crafting spells and stuff

So all my good mood from yesterday was decimated by GTA not working properly. (For no reason)
Today was a less productive day but still a fruitful day after all, my productivity was reduced by a seminar on the morning about how to write our synopsis and a tutoring session on the afternoon. Interesting and important as these were, they still weren’t actual work.
As for actual work today however, I looked into the spell system we had purchased and found out […]

I will not make this title “Learning how to spell”

A good day today, plenty of progress and didn’t really get stuck. I spent most of the day setting up the input structure for the spell system. The idea is to read the stick inputs when the play is holding down the corresponding trigger and then compare the movements with a list of locations which are assigned to a spell each which can then be cast.
The “Magic cast” function has three segments: Read Stick Input, Compare To Player Spells and […]

Write Smart Code

When you write source code, the more meaning you can pack in the same number of code lines, the better. The code becomes “less verbose” and more difficult to fathom but to a programmer’s eye, it also becomes more elegant.
Below are some tricks which I learned during the courses Game Programming I and II. Most of them aren’t anything special and are probably obvious to an experienced programmer but I still notice a lot of my colleague students still prefer […]