Easy level making

Hi! In todays blogpost I would like to talk about how we made our levels in A Rat Betwixt.
The levels are designed around the game being square-grid based and around the overlooking camera angle.
The first step to creating  a room for the level is whiteboxing an idea in the engine. The one I am showing today ended up looking like this:
The whiteboxed room in the engine shot from straight above
As you can see in the picture I have left room […]

BGP – 6

In last post I talked about bikes and bike stands etc! So I guess now I should introduce the school…

The good thing about our game is that we had a time limit. That basically means the player doesn’t have too much time to roam around and investigate the environment and notice all the possible things that could be missing. There can be so much weird things located in classrooms, especially in elementary school because they are filled with drawings made […]

A new beginning: Rune Mages in retrospect!

Time has come once again to write on this blog. This time, I will be writing about my second-year project, Rune Mages! Again, I was the Lead Programmer, and as such I will be discussing topics primarlily concerning structuring the systems behind the scenes.
See you soon!

Big Game Project Post 4

Since i’ve been incredibly bussy with BGP, GGC (Gotland Game Conference) and moving i haven’t been able to upload my posts on schedule. I’ve been living without internet lately but finally made it to the mainland/Stockholm back to my home town Norrtälje where i have internet.
This post will mainly be about the UI(User interface), the decisions i had to make and why.
The Project A Rat Betwixt is a game that takes place on a main screen, a tv for example […]

Fixing the silhouette of a troll

Hi!
In this blogpost I would like to talk about the reiteration of the troll mesh for our game.
The troll of our game is a bigger enemy type, both in its appearence and as a threat. It’s inspiration and lore is that this old troll who resides in the bunker is an old John Bauer troll who, ever since he was insprisoned in the bunker some odd millenia ago, lives in the dark comfort of the bunker.
The idea we drew on […]

Detecting Sound

The game’s main mechanic is listening for survivors using triangulation with seismic sensors. To achieve this I created game objects that could be placed out into the world that held a sound file. We wanted the sound to be louder the closer to a sensor it was, rather than just have it play when within a certain radius. To make this work I had to implement a fall-off algorithm. First I tried to just make a simple fall-off where at […]

A Rat Betwixt Blog Post #6 – The Final Post and Additional Insight

This final post will be a long one, so Buckle Up!
So, it finally came. The end of what took up the complete majority of the last 2 months of my life. The initial release of the vertical slice of the game design studies game project – A Rat Betwixt.
So for this final blog post I will talk about the project and my final insights on the project as a whole and my involvment in it.
If you want to see the […]

BGP – 5

I want to tell a little bit about the things that I liked the most and at the same time they were also the most time consuming.
Im going to start with the fountain. The plaza was large and rather empty. We were thinking should we perhaps make a statue or a fountain. After a short while, everyone agreed on the fountain.
Okay, so the progress of creating the mesh for the statue didn’t go as I planned. First, I though in […]

BGP – 4

 
Hello again and again… x) I don’t have that much to explain about different things that I created since the main task that I had was to create the props so to be honest, I am a little bit unsure should I choose one prop and explain about that or choose a category (like I did in my first post with the bar props)… So confusing!
Oh well… Maybe I can make a list that is good to have in mind […]

#6 – Making various graphical assets

This might have been the most fun part with developing our game. Even if everything mentioned before also has been fun to do, they had a higher risk of not being able to be finished than the upcoming graphical assets have. They are very easy to do, and when they all get done very quickly I get this feeling that I have been very efficient at work. Since most of these assets will not be seen up close I also […]

#5 – Animating the character

Animating a character takes a lot of time while the number of graphic artists in the group is short and the amount of time we have is short as well. But we were actually able to make it in time while also being able to tweak the (amount of) animations as much as we wanted with the help of a site called Mixamo.com. Mixamo both rigs our character and has a wide range of different animations that we are allowed […]

#4 – UV-Mapping

UV-mapping means that the surface of the 3d model will be unfolded in a picture so that our material and textures can be applied to the 3d model. But there’s a difference in UV-mapping in a lousy way, in an acceptable way and in a fantastic way. Depending on how well the UV-mapping is done the textures will look less distorted on the 3d model and the textures won’t be too much for our game to process. Not that any […]