Blog Post #2

Hello again!
For this week I’m going to write about the playtesting that took place during Monday earlier this week. All the groups were gathered in one big room to showcase their games and to try out other groups’ games.
This was a great experience. Not only because we got to try all the games out, but also because of all valuable feedback we received for our game. Before we attended the playtesting I prepared a survey containing a bunch of question […]

Tether System

This week I worked on a ”tether system” between a teddy bear that is controlled with the mouse and a girl that is controlled with the WASD keys. The goal of the tether system is to render a tether between the two characters to visualize their connection to each other.
The reason why we decided on having a tether between them is because of feedback from the playtest. Our testers didn’t understand why the teddy bear is shooting a projectile towards […]

Our enemies

Hi, this is one my second blog post, the first one after the alpha presentation and playtesting. I’m gonna talk about one of our base mechanics, the enemies.
In the concept that we are currently working on (Burn witch burn) the main character gets chased by the “mob” an unkillable horde of angry farmers that hunts yo through out the first level. While trying to run away from this unkillable mob, the player will encounter other obstacles and enemies. This enemies […]

Visual Feedback

We are nearing the end of the fifth week of this project. This week we had our first playtesting session and the Alpha presentation. From the playtest we got a lot of useful tips and comments, but one thing that almost everyone commented on is the lack of feedback for the player, enemy and destructible objects taking damage. So I implemented the feedback before we had the Alpha presentation.
First I did a pretty simple feedback for the player taking damage. […]

Navigating through the darkness

Our game is a very dark one, therefore its important that the player have some means of navigation. In the original concept document, the player was supposed to use some sort of coneshaped sonar fireing strait ahead, but I felt like that might not be engough, at least not for the more open world labyrinth we had in mind. Like for instant, an enemy could sneak up behind you and kill you without you knowing what hit you.
Instead me and […]

Testing the Teleport

Extending last week’s post, the teleport is being developed further in our 2D shoot ’em up game.
First, the implementation of the teleport was fixed. Unity’s rotation axes don’t use the Cartesian Axes reference point, but starts on the positive y axis instead. The teleport now uses basic trigonometry to calculate the radius from the player and confines it to the maximum radius, set in the inspector.
We had also begun playtesting the teleport. The lack of any indication of the maximum […]

Visualizing player health without a HUD

In this weeks blog I would like to write about the task of trying to present the health of the players health without using a HUD.

Realize you don’t want a HUD
Brainstorm ideas on how to make something visible without it
???
Profit

The original plan for our project was to make a bullet hell-esque game. Because of this we felt that it would be necessary to show the amount of available lives  directly on the players avatar to not divert the players focus.
Since the […]

The Art Of Creating Satisfying Feedback!

At the start of the project we decide that one of are main focus was to create a satisfying game play when you use your weapons to shoot your enemies. To achieve this i started to dig in to the deeps of  the internet to later find anything that could help me to learn and understand the art of creating feedback. On my time digging something caught my eye. A video from the Nordic game confreres  2012 Juice it or lose […]

Week 2: The Basic Enemy

For one of our enemies we wanted to start with having a simple behavior that would only move in one direction. The enemy would be moving from right to left and be randomly spawned in on a vertical line slightly outside the main view of the game.
As this would mostly be for learning and having an enemy that wouldn’t do much more than moving straight we decided that having it spawn in endlessly would be a good first step.
The enemy […]

Making of The Main Theme Soundtrack

I’ve always liked to compose soundtracks for games. Since I experienced the beautiful soundtrack of Yoshi’s Island, the idea of me being the next Koji Kondo or Yoko Shimomura has enticed me! I’d like to talk more about what happened from my first experience with a good OST to now, but I’ll skip it so I don’t bore my viewers.
A great opportunity to test what I can do approached me when a lead sound designer was requested for my team. I quickly […]

Tears are made of camera zoom

The size of the camera can be used to set the mood for the player. Look at this picture:
Guy in space
And then this picture:
Lonely guy in space. Don’t you feel bad for him?
Note the emotional impact! Now that you understand the great value of controlling camera zoom, let’s talk about how I implemented it in our game.
We want our level designers to have the tools to control camera zoom for different areas, like in the image below.
A zoomed-out area and […]

Blog 2 – Week 7

Working with the Power Up
For about the past two weeks I have been trying to perfect the power up script. I, like many others, do not know Unity very well so it takes time to learn all the different ways to do achieve the same outcome. A little background before discussing the way I have been able to get the power up to the point it’s at now. For the alpha of our game we wanted to have a power […]