Creating the soundscape

In addition to being a programmer for the game, I was also designated Lead sound. While I’ve been mostly focused on the coding, I’ve also tried to think about what the soundscape of the game should be. I have some slight previous experience in making music and soundeffects in a program called sunvox, which is a tracker (modular synthesizer with pattern-based sequencer).
The Sunvox tracker
I wanted to make sure that all sounds in the game where consistent for […]

Reworked HUD with a reticle

Our game is nearing its finished state, and we have been working hard on polishing the features. Earlier I wrote about a working on the HUD, and how we were thinking of adding a reticle which would display the cooldowns in a more intuitive way. So I worked on that a bit.
We received a lot of feedback that our teleport cooldown was not visible, as it was in the bottom left corner, so we wanted that to be on the […]

The justification for removing the infernal split screen.

In this blog i will talk about why we decided to remove the split screen aspect from our game. As i’ve said in other blogs; the game concept we chose for our shooter was “Bullet_Hack” which had the main theme of split screen.

In the beginning we tried to keep as close to the concept as we could, but after failing at maknig the split screen as it was described in the document we moved away from the idea and tried […]

Bypassing Unity’s faults

Our game is down to just polish now, so we are focusing on making everything be as good looking and bug-free as possible. One of the issues I mentioned last week was that for some reason unity refused to change the color of game objects which had an Animator attached to them. Luckily I found a way to remedy this problem.
While Unity refused to change the regular R, G, B settings of the color of the object, bizarrely enough, it […]

WEEK 5 – THE LOW POINT

WHAT
This week I was tasked with continuing to create the sounds for the game, while also making them less annoying to hear on repeat by making the volume and pitch fluctuate on every play of the sound. The tasks I had consisted of:

Code the pitch script
Create the orb pickup sound
Create the Getting Hit sound
Continue working on the Death Sound
Continue working on the Enemy hit sound
Create sounds for the main menu

HOW
This is where I usually write how I went about doing […]

WEEK 4 – STARTING WITH SOUNDS

WHAT
During the forth week I was tasked with starting to make some sounds for our game. The main focus was put on creating a good sound for when the player character shoots. Other sounds I wanted to make during this sprint included:

Shooting Sound
Pick Up Sound
Power-Up Shooting Sound
Weapon Pick Up sound
Getting Hit Sound
Death Sound

The direction I got for the shooting sound was ”Make it sound like his inner energy”. It was pretty vague but I had an idea of what I […]

Melee Attack

This is supposed to be the last blog post for this course but I will not stop writing posts since I still have some artifacts that I haven’t talked about.
In this post, I am going to talk about the melee attack for the player in our game and how it changed during the development of the game. For those who don’t know, the melee is basically a close-range attack between a player and an enemy that could be done using a knife, […]

UI Rework

This week, I’m going to write about the two core components of the game UI. The navigation lights and the child status panel. The navigation lights were added because the feedback from the play testing showed that people were getting lost a lot and needed an easier way to navigate the map. The child status panel was added because the old one was long due for a revamp.
So, to start with, the child status panel. This is what the old […]

Camera Movement

This week I’ve been working on our game’s camera. It’s heavily inspired on the camera behaviors of games like Zelda or Metroidvania. It basically follows the player until it hits the boundary of a room where it then stops. If the player enters another room from there, the camera will transition over to the new room and then follow that room’s boundaries.
I created this because once more we in our group have decided to re-design a few things. As we […]

Ricochet Projectile

This week I worked on, among other things, a power up which, when activated, launches a projectile which ricochets off of the sceen boundary and all enemies. It damages all enemies it collides with and stops bouncing around after a set period of time.
The design thought behind the projectile is to add power ups that encourage skillful usage of them. When an enemy drops a powerup, it drops three which all go in separate directions.
(The image above shows the three […]

Adding new sounds – Week 4

Hello and welcome to my blog.
This Monday we had the beta playtesting where we had to show our improved game since the last playtesting. The feedback was a lot better than the last one due to the fact that, people actually gave us a feedback on the things we already had implemented into the game, instead of writing what they would like to see.
I was pleased to see that we got a really positive feedback regarding the sounds in the […]

Knights’ Knowledge

In this blog I’ve written about the teleportation mechanic and it’s dynamics. Last week I introduced the knight, which is an enemy that blocks the player’s shots from the front with a shield and needs to be teleported behind of to strike the vulnerable back.

The behavior of the knight is similar to other enemies’ and thus didn’t require much work. Only a few variables were tweaked in the inspector to suit the knight’s attributes, slow and sturdy.
An obstacle was met […]