Moth game: Improving the sonar with procedural mesh generation

This week we had our first playtest. Among the feedback we received, there was this idea of having the sonar bounce or stop when it collided with obstacles. This would make sense, since that’s usually how sonars work in the real world, but also because of how it impacts the gameplay. If the sonar can be used to see through everything, there won’t be as many options for how to build in surprises in a level. Blocking the sonar opens […]

Ammo UI (Coding) – Week 2

Last week, i accepted the task of making the ammo UI for our game. While i thought the task would be relatively simple, i was proven wrong when i actually began the work on it. While the task seems simple enough, i also had to go through the code written by my fellow teamates, which required a significant amount of time. That time of course, was spent to understand the code already written and further on used for the aforementioned task. […]

Weapon Upgrades

Last week we began discussing having various weapons in our game, so we decided to have them as a sort of “Temporary” upgrade. Currently the player starts with just a pistol. It has a medium fire rate, basic 1 shot pattern and the projectiles move at a somewhat normal pace. On top of this, since it is the starter weapon, it has infinite ammo as well.
Marcus mentioned something that was already on my mind, which was that we should have […]

Living Lightning

This week I have created a lightning projectile.

In the beginning of the game, two projectiles are available. A basic projectile that simply kills enemies, and an absorbing projectile that will absorb the elemental power of an elemental enemy when it kills it. When the elemental enemy dies, a powerup is spawned which automatically flies over to the player and positions itself on the cloud (the player is flying on a small cloud).
If the player dies while carrying a powerup, she will […]

My Second Game Design Blog Post – Simple damage feedback and a bit about my damage system.

Hello, today I will be writing about my simple damage feedback that I did. The point of a damage feedback is to visualize that an object that can take damage, took it. You can do that in plenty of ways for example you can create a knockback effect that pushes away the Player from the source of damage after touching it, you can create a text above the Player that the damage was dealt or as I did here, colour […]

Week 2 – Extended Player

What
For the second sprint for our game I was tasked to extend our player characters functions. I needed to extend our collision with the screen boundaries, enemies and enemy projectiles, which would also defeat the player character. I was also tasked with making the first instance of our melee attack. For this I needed to create or utilize:

Colliders for the player character, enemies and projectiles. These were already implemented after the first sprint.
A lose state. Make the player character disappear […]

Post α post – Change and Refine

Well then, that’s the alpha over.
Now what will we talk about today?
Mainly the second enemy (again). And the importance of feedback. As, this week was all about tweaking the enemy, refining the code it used, and improving upon what we had.
 
The alpha testing that was conducted on the Monday (13/2-17) this week gave some excellent feedback. Having a good balance of both direct and mixed reviews on different aspects of the game.
In my case, I was mainly interested in the […]

Adding sounds – Week 2

Today was the Alpha presentation day! Excitement! We saw all the games that are currently in progress, and it was amazing how creative people can be, coming up with different interpretations on the same design document. It also felt good noticing that your feedback was taken into consideration, right after the testing day.
I will write today about the sound that I implemented in the game. I will continue this post by explaining why I chose those sounds and how I implemented […]

First blog post on Draxl’s journey

Hello! I am Christofer Mattsson the lead coder in team Leviathan. Our prodject right now is under ten weeks make a game called draxl’s journey.
This is my first blog post on this project so I am going to explain what the game is and our goals with it.
Draxl’s is a casual space shooter where you play as a spaceship that explore the beautiful space. But other civilizations are scared of you, so when you get close to their planet they […]

Game Design 2 – State Manager

Code structure while working on our termination conditions using a state manager and a notification center.

Implemented a Level Handler

Implemented a LevelHandler
What?
The most recent implementation that I did was a so called “Level Handler” which is an object that you pull into a game scene, that lets you decide how this entire scene should behave during gameplay.
It has the possibility to easily manage the behavior of the entire level, changing spawn positions and change scenes and the different graphical user interfaces that we might need such during pause functions, cutscenes and so on.
It also keeps track of win and […]

Adding entities to a “Parade”

A couple of weeks ago I started working on the parade mechanic within our game. Since we have decided to change the parade mechanic, but still do not know what we will change it into, I have since stopped working on it for the time being. However, I figured what I do have implemented with the mechanic would still be interesting to talk about.
So first of all, the parade as of this moment consists of enemies you have killed, who […]