Moth game: Clues

What now?
Most of the mechanics in our game are finished, and we’re getting close to the final deadline. What’s left is polishing the experience of the mechanics, so that the player knows what to do and can feel a sense of progression. One particularily confusing situation players would face in our game was encountering breakable and openable branches. This was clear during beta playtesting, where we would see players bump into the branches, not aware of how to break through. […]

Saving, Loading, Scoring

As a last post / update on this project I’ll tell you about the very last work I have had to focus on during this past week. And that is scoring, and the ability to save and load these scores.
For anyone who hasn’t followed these post: We are currently in the process of developing a small endless shooter, which we’ve now given the name “Burn Cube Burn”. Players in this game must survive an endless onslaught of evil cubes, hellbent […]

The Illusion of Progress

I thought I had run out of things to talk about by this point, but of course by given how creative I am, there’s at least one more thing worth writing a blog post about.
Creativity doesn’t equal great so I’m not certain if this’ll be an interesting read, but let’s see how my blog writing can save it!
In Spirits of The Shogun when outside of fighting, the background scrolls with a parallax effect whenever the player pushes against the right boundary. […]

Understanding how to survive

Pre-Post-Mortem

This week concludes the series of blog posts about “Burn Witch, Burn!”. As such, I felt that a retrospective post is justified, even though the development process continues for another week. Being the lead coder in our group I’m going to focus on that aspect of the project.
The project was my first in Unity and C#, resulting in some hurdles that had to be overcome, or dragged along to the finish line. In C++ the #include directive is used to […]

Blog Post #5

“Chill Week”
Since the beta presentation, I have felt a huge relief both for the better and the worse. The current version of the project is on my laptop which I sadly don’t have in reach right now so there will be no pictures in this one, but will edit the post once I get the chance and add one.
I feel like the game is almost done, all that is left is some minor bug fixes, animations and a complete pause […]

Sound Settings (Coding) – Week 5

Now that we are slowly closing in to the final release of the game, one of the leftover tasks left to get involved with, are the sound settings of the game. Namely, i am talking about the master volume of the game, as well as the music volume and the SFX volume of it. As everyone is probably familiar with, there are always sounds in games that can be intrusive to different people (explosions or shooting for example), so the […]

How To Use GitHub

GitHub is a software that lets several people share and alter files like images and C#. This makes it so multiple people can work on the same project at once on different computers, at any time any were. You can create branches of the project, copies of the original files so testing can be done without the risk of destroying anything. These branches can be re introduce to the main files, merging them.
When getting GitHub you get GitHub and Git […]

Getting ready for the final test – Week 5

Hello!
I will start this post by saying that I really enjoyed playing the game at the beta presentation, the crowd laughed, applauded, everything went great.
As usual, I will show you the current state of the game:

The game is almost complete. The days that remain are for polishing this gem. I will talk about what was added, since the last post, and what I will continue working on.
There is a beautiful sound that can be heard when you’re getting close to […]

Particle effects

Right then, fifth (and final?) blog post. This week I’ve been doing mostly small fixes and balancing changes to the game as I’ve found them, leaving me with less time than I’d hoped to work on particle effects. Nevertheless I have made some progress, and learned a lot. So let’s jump into it! (Note: While the featured image is a particle effects it aint something I made. I just wanted to show what CAN be done using particle effects.)
What?
So what […]

Flower Power

Very cool, amirite?
In this post I am going to talk about the patterns for shooting that the boss in our game uses. The patterns that the group came up with were spirals, cones and pulsating circles, you can see some examples of how these turned out in the GIFs below. To go along these patterns I also wanted the boss to be able to increase the complexity of the shooting the closer to death it got.



 
For the first […]

Expired Code

This week I will not be writing about exciting new features, but instead of something very serious and important: moldy code.

Forgetting to Close the Fridge
Most people are more excited about fresh food than the leftovers. I’ve been implementing features at lightning speed, but not putting any hours for code refactoring.
Always hack it in. If something works, just drop it (even if the implementation is half done). If it stops working, go back and fix it.
The Mold
A couple weeks of haxing […]