Start Screen

Hello reader 
The artefact I have been working with this week is the start screen. The start screen is what welcomes players to the game and acts as an intermediate between starting the game and playing it. It also gives the player the option to exit the game and has a button to another menu that hold some optional things to press like a button to see the controls and a button that opens the settings. 
The way I made the start screen was by creating a new unity scene that the start menu is supposed to be in. I add some unity buttons that are going to be the buttons you use to get around. The […]

Creating a level manager, kinda…

Once again, I’m Guy Dimor from team Wendigo, and today I’ll write about how I created a maybe-sorta-kinda-not really level manager.
Before the beta playtests, there were some things still missing from our game, not the least of which being an actual series of levels. Instead we had a randomly generated endless mode, which didn’t have much replayability and did not have any progression. We knew this would pose a problem with the playtesters, as this was no longer alpha and […]

Harpoon the Goon

This week I have been working on a few different things, but one of the main things I have done is set a limit on the use of the harpoon. In our game, Umibozu, the player must use their harpoon to kill enemies but should be careful to avoid shooting vital power-ups.
We aim to facilitate ‘mystery’ in Umibozu, by forcing the player to use their floodlight to uncover potential enemies/power-ups etc. (which all share the same sprite while covered by […]

Adding Animations

This week most of my time was spent on adding animations to the different enemy types as well as the Behemoth Cannon to give the game more life and to also give some visual feedback to the player when he does certain actions or when certain things happen on screen.


In order to add an animation, I first get a sprite sheet from my artists that has each frame of that animation in an equally sized cell, I then […]

Simple AI

Today, I am going to be talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its most simple terms. AI is the intelligence that is placed on Non-Player Characters or NPC’s. NPC’s for example, are the enemies or villagers within a game. As a programmer that is relatively new to Game programming it can be hard to implement… Continue reading Simple AI

Add a new enemy type: shooting enemy

Before the beta playtesting, I was working on adding a new enemy which can shoot at the player in our game. Before that, there were only two kinds of enemies in our game: glaucus and pufferfish, and they all behaved in a similar way. In the game they will only move to the player, not firing projectiles, which is a bit boring in a shoot’em up game.
Then our group decided to add a new enemy to our game: Sky ray. […]

Game Design 2: Blogpost #4, Balancing and level-design

During the making of our game Behemoth, we found it important that we wanted the game to feel challenging but also fair. A lot of time was spent tweaking the difficulty in accordance to different people’s input about the game (you can read more about this in blog #5).
The tutorial of the game is set up to introduce the player to all the main mechanics that they will need to use in the later levels.
The first two levels of the […]

Checkpoints

The game is split between several stages, each consisting of the player advancing through an autoscroller fighting minor mobs until the leviathan appears, covered in a natural armor. At this point the player hooks a harpoon into one of the whales armor plates via a small whole created by the crystals growing on the whale and rips it off. This reveals a weak spot where the player can fire it’s weapons to do damage, eventually driving away the whale and […]

Scrum

I have had some limited experience with scrum before, but in a much reduced form compared to what we are practicing here. While we did compose a backlog and hold daily stand ups, we mostly just picked a task to do and worked on it, without much further direction. The sprints were simply times at which we reviewed what had been completed so far and discussed what to prioritize for next sprint. Here however, every sprint is preceded by the […]

Comment #3

This is Guy Dimor from group Wendigo, here we go…
First of all, this is surprisingly well-written and properly sourced for a blog post, which also made it a very easy read. In addition, you gave a complete and total rundown of about everything related to scrum, so now I don’t even know if I have anything more to say about it. Won’t stop me from trying, though.
I liked how each paragraph covered its own topic (as a paragraph should) and […]

Comment : Blog post assignment 3

Hey Guy, enjoyed reading your post. I have quite a similar perspective being the lead programmer for my group as well, so this was quite a relatable read. I had the same overall hesitance to use scrum at first, since it made my job more annoying and yeah, it was a bit like a know-it-all mom telling me I should eat my vegetables, but after a bit it got better. For me it’s still not perfect but y’know, better than […]

Comment #3: Karel

Link to Karel’s Blogpost!
“Hej hej!
You provided a structured and very informative blog post explaining scrum and handling priorities with MoSCoW. I really like that you describe both principles in great detail and connect them to your work on the shoot em up game. The introduction and conclusion you give also create a good framework for the reader to follow.

However, there are a lot of technical terms in your post that could be hard to understand for someone who […]