2018.03.01 – Maximizing your Audio budget using pitch variation

Why do we need sound?
In order to help the player enter into the magic circle, we need to consider all aspects of the game feel such as movement, visual cues, and audio feedback. Today we will be tackling the last one.
Audio helps us conveying information to the player by engaging another sense besides visual and tactile (e.g. rumble). Relaying feedback via audio, allows us to:

further immerse the player by making sure all possible sense are engaged in the universe we […]

Smoke and Mirrors

Welcome back!
Fredrik here again, and this time I will bring you a peek into the design process of the AI in my game. As the title suggests, AI is usually not what you’d think when you experience it as the player. For instance, in our game, we struggled a lot with the AI even though it’s part of the core mechanics of the game. The AI is supposed to be what achieves the aesthetic of belonging in our game. You […]

01-03-2018

This Monday we had our first playtest since the Alpha preview. This blog post will be about lessons I learned from the feedback my group got from that testing.
At first, some of the feedback we got was quite confusing, and some downright offended me as the programmer. People were writing that the attacks didn’t work and that enemies were invincible. And I knew that just wasn’t true! But why were so many people saying the same thing? The answer came […]

Enemie Polish

Hello everyone. I have been working on and polishing the enemies in our game. In particular the Dragonfly, Spider, and the Wasp. First up was the Dragonfly. We wanted to clean the enemies as they play an essential role in our game and because what we had was mainly placeholder enemies so we could focus on more critical issues we had.
I modified the pattern to how it moved so it would be more erratic. More specifically I made so it […]

More than One Sprite

From struggling with one of the most difficult obstacles that I have encountered in programming so far,  I have now finally learned how to design a formation of enemies in my video game, that can also be called upon to attack our player. Very exciting indeed, and because of this, the main design and programming of one of our enemies, which is also the main attack called upon from one of our other enemies, is finally completed, and another Scrum-goal […]

#4 PreBeta Work: Player Feature #2

As the time before Beta Presentations draws closer and closer I find myself having to delegate my time efficiently and effectively. It doesn’t help that I recently purchased the game Celeste and played it a shit ton this week and forgoed some of my work, but I did manage to make a lot of progress this week!
Working on the Big Boi Weapon
This Week most of the coding I did revolved around our Player Big Boi Gun as well as setting […]

Boss behaviors in shooting game

This week I implemented the behaviors of the Boss in our game. Though we already have a draft about some basic ideas and patterns, we still encountered some detailed problem which made us to abandoned several previous thoughts.
In general, the boss is a giant fish with high health point and powerful attack. I divided boss behaviors to three parts. One is the entering state, after a player cleared the final wave of enemies the boss spawning logic triggered. It be […]

Blog post 4 – Adding the animations to the objects

We in the group Archon are working on a game named Aetherial and it is part of our school project. And for the past week we have been working on the goals for the Beta presentation. And the thing I have worked the most on for this sprint is Implementing the Animations for the game and make it behave as they should. I needed to make scripts and put them on to the different objects, because it will make the […]

Blog post 2 Comment on Edin Karakurt

The reader got a clear picture of what the author has been working. The writer also explains why it was essential and the teams thought process when the power-up was developed and made it a reality. The reader also got a sense what the writer encountered when he created the power-up, how the power-up became a suicide by making all of the enemies targeting the player. The reader would personally like a bit more on how that problem was solved […]

Fourth post: Movement

In my first post I talked about the perspective of our game, Umibōzu, and how we had to change some of our design decisions because of it. One of the mechanics affected by these decisions was the movement system. In this post, I wish to talk a little bit about the movement in our game.
Making a movement system is both very easy and very difficult. It is fairly trivial to make a player avatar move when you press a button, but […]

Dev Blog 4, Level Wrapping

This week I will be writing about how our design goals and ways to achieve those goals impacted the way our levels are implemented.
The camera system in our game is top-down, and the camera controls the pace at which the player progresses. The camera moves upwards on the screen at a set pace. Side to side however, the player is free to move as they wish. The goal with this design is to give a feeling of exploration and freedom, […]

Learning about Sound Design and Feedback

Besides my role as programmer I am also the lead sound designer at our game project aetherial. I felt comfortable picking that role since I did have some experience in music (I played cello for about 10 years) and because I already had some very minor experience in editing and creating sounds digitally. However learning an entire software is no small task and I am still learning new stuff every day about FL Studio, which is the software I chose […]