Planning

After the pitch for the game was approved, a plan was required so that the ones responsible for the course could see that we were going to make the vertical slice within the time allotted for development. In the concept, we had decided what the vertical slice would consist of. The planning was a collaborative effort of the entire group, because each member has an area that they know how much time is necessary for each artifact. In the planning […]

Concept

Before the course started the students received a chance to pitch a game idea. In these pitch sessions, the students received feedback from both members of the institution and their peers. During this stage I wrote the concept for Fast Gear and pitched it during the first one of these sessions. The pitch consisted of the core ideas of Fast Gear from the perspective of improving the racing class Formula 1. The feedback I received from Jakob Berglund Rogert consisted […]

The award scene (And a poster)

When the race concludes, we wanted to make a scene where we show the placement of the characters in said race. To do this we’d have to make sprites for each and every combination of results that could be achieved. Since these characters will be set more naturally into the environment than the dialogue-scenes, I thought that they should match the simplicity of the environment. This means that they’re more or less colored silouettes. So to get across the emotions […]

An Introduction and the Design Document

Hello and welcome to my blog. In this blog I will describe the development process of Fast Gear. Fast gear is a story-based racing game with art and sound inspired by the 80s. In Fast Gear the player will race around circuits all over the world against AI opponents that each have personality. But the player will meet these characters off track as well. Off track the player will be able to spend time with their opponents to fom relationships […]

Leon is split into pieces!!

So we made a really ballsy decision last week, considering it’s very close to GGC. We made the decision to split Olivias plushie, Leon, into different pieces that the player could then find throughout the game. The reason we did this, was that we did not really feel like we gave the player any motivation to continue to move through the game.
Anyway, so Leon now gets ripped in pieces at the beginning of the game, and your quest is to […]

Music and sound effects

Music and sound effects are a big part of Somnium, that is really important to convey our aesthetic goal to the audience. For example, in order to create the specific music and ambient sound, we have had the great opportunity to be in contact with a student from the nearby “Tonsättarskolan” and had him develop the ambient sound and music for us. This way the music is tailored for the game, and the events of occurring in our game.
Since we […]

Causality

Hi I’m the producer and lead AI programmer on team Yggdrasil that is currently developing the game Causality.
 
Using behaviour trees is fantastic and all but after consulting our teacher we came to the conclusion that maybe it is a bit too much overkill and maybe too much for our project. We do not need to use such complicated systems for a boss in all honesty.
I mostly wanted to use it for the learning process and doing something I never done […]

Causality

Hi I’m the producer and lead AI programmer on team Yggdrasil that is currently developing the game Causality.
 
We have movement!
After many days of hard work our “boss” was alive.
We had movement using a simple basic implementation an of behaviour tree. Using sequencer nodes that calls the run behaviour in each child node until one returns false then the parent node returns false and the behaviour ends until reset. Our boss could track our player and relentlessly follow him forever.
This was […]

Causality

Hi I’m the producer and lead AI programmer on team Yggdrasil that is currently developing the game Causality.
 
Our goal with this project was to create a vertical slice, a demo if you will of what our game would be about showing of our core mechanics against a single boss fight.
We wanted it to be cool, fluid and challenging, forcing the player to find patterns and recognise different ques in order to overcome and defeat the boss.
 
This meant for us to […]

Modularity – Building a city

Back to the writing! It’s been a crazy journey so far.
In this post I thought I would talk a little about working with a modular environment and how that can help the production. This is something that was comepletely new to us when the project started and that we had to work on by ourselves in order to learn the does and don’ts.
Our game takes place in parts of a bombed city, which means that a lot of buildings are […]

Veckoreflektion V.9 Fast Gear

Under denna vecka har vi arbetat med att implementera de sista mekanikerna, fixat menyer och loading screens. Dessa mekaniker innefattar rubberbanding och positionssytem för finish line.
Rubberbanding innebär att om spelaren är framför AI-bilarna så ökar AI:ns hastighet för att göra loppet intressant och dynamiskt. Det gjordes med hjälp av de checkpointsystem vi implementerade förra veckan. Funktionen som gjordes jämför spelarens checkpoint mot alla olika AI-bilar. Alltså kollar funktionen vilken checkpoint respektive bil är på och utifrån det så ändras hastigheten. Detsamma […]

Fast Gear blog 6

Jag har nu i slutstadiet av produktionsperioden skapat en ”ScreenShake” som skakar kameran när bilen kolliderar med de olika relingarna som ligger utmed banan för att förhindra spelaren att åka utan för vägen.
Med hjälp av en asset som en av grafikerna i gruppen hittat så kunde jag relativt enkelt implementera att kameran skulle skaka vid kollision. Det uppstod dock ett problem när jag satte ”screenshaken” att hända vid kollision med andra bilar. Då slutade den plötsligt att hända vid kollision […]