4th post – pressure before the Beta presentation

Beta presentation is coming up next week. By then we have to be finished with core features, movement, attacks, UI, and challenges. It is a tough week and we have felt quite a lot of pressure recently. Things does not always go as we want them to go. The harsh winter weather caused problems, because many people got sick, and so did some members in our team. We had some delays and it seems that we are running out of […]

Enemie Polish

Hello everyone. I have been working on and polishing the enemies in our game. In particular the Dragonfly, Spider, and the Wasp. First up was the Dragonfly. We wanted to clean the enemies as they play an essential role in our game and because what we had was mainly placeholder enemies so we could focus on more critical issues we had.
I modified the pattern to how it moved so it would be more erratic. More specifically I made so it […]

More than One Sprite

From struggling with one of the most difficult obstacles that I have encountered in programming so far,  I have now finally learned how to design a formation of enemies in my video game, that can also be called upon to attack our player. Very exciting indeed, and because of this, the main design and programming of one of our enemies, which is also the main attack called upon from one of our other enemies, is finally completed, and another Scrum-goal […]

One-page document

Hello, I am Hampus Bergström, the game designer for the team Wendigo that works on the game Umibōzu. For the last few weeks I have created and updated a one-page document for the team. The document contains explanations and images of every feature and asset in the main game mode of the game that is currently implemented in our development build or are soon to be implemented.
As we progressed further into development I noticed that not everyone could keep up […]

Redoing the animations before Beta…

It’s almost time for the next beta submission and everyone is barely wasting any time. Last time during the alpha presentation, few of the games were already way ahead of the others and not to mention as everyone in m group being totally new in this education without any prior experience, we were not one of them. However, the team effort was never less and thus at this beta point, we have a much better illustration of the game than […]

Blog 4

Starting Menu and GUI
Starting menus are very common elements for video games. They are so common that game designers would make these menus without justifying the necessity. In some cases, however, a traditional starting menu with different bottoms can be totally unnecessary. The menu will only break the illusion without providing any utility. Instead, a starting scene or a “safe zone” can well substitute the functionality of the game and help improve the immersion. The starting scene below made for […]

Ready, set, Scrum!

In order to keep track of our progress and make sure that we keep on schedule me and my group have been using an Agile development methodology called Scrum. The goal is to constantly work towards creating a minimum viable product, and iterating on that until the product has the features and quality desired. It is also characterized by working in small teams with short daily meetings in order to make sure that everyone knows what is going within the […]

#4 PreBeta Work: Player Feature #2

As the time before Beta Presentations draws closer and closer I find myself having to delegate my time efficiently and effectively. It doesn’t help that I recently purchased the game Celeste and played it a shit ton this week and forgoed some of my work, but I did manage to make a lot of progress this week!
Working on the Big Boi Weapon
This Week most of the coding I did revolved around our Player Big Boi Gun as well as setting […]

Level Designing the start of our game – August Demirsson

As mentioned before the game me and my group chose was Umibozu. The main mechanics in our game is to follow a terrain and kill enemies that’s in the players’ way of making it to the finish.
In order to present these mechanics to the player the start of our game is designed as an introduction to all the mechanics in a simple way. If you somehow would fail the trail you would only lose a maximum of 20 seconds progress […]

5SD064-The making of fog shape

Hi, now we come to the 4th blog in the blog journey and that means we are not far from completing the very first game in our Game Design study! This week we didn’t have any lecture from Game Design 2 but play-testing on Monday which gathered many valuable feedback to improve our game before the BETA. Today I want to talk about a small artifact from our game “Umibozu” —- fog shape.
“Fog shape” might sounds bit wired, it is […]

Lycanthrope: Sounds…

Hello! My name is Mattias Borgqvist and I am currently working on a shoot em up game based on the concept document “A game of beelonging” by group Ouroboros.
This week I want talk about sounds and since I am the lead sound designer in our group this is something that I have been responsible for, making our game feel the right way and make sure that it feels like a harmonious and coherent experience.
Before working on “Beeloning” I had barely […]

Cobbling things like a carpenter – or reusing assets

As we are heading into the final sprints I’m sure we all have noticed the need for polish and just the feelings that we don’t have enough time to finish everything we want to do. Well my team definitely noticed this, and after trimming and cutting some content we were left with a list of things that needed to be done until release. Then we took that list and looked at what could be done with the help of old […]