Creating sounds

During the last week, I have been creating sounds for the game. It has been an interesting challenge for me, since I have never been editing sounds before. Moa Bruus (Lead Sound and Artist), has been very busy with numerous artifacts conserning art. Therefore, I have been helping out by editing audio files.

To know what kind of audio we needed to implement in the game, the group had a discussion about what sounds we wanted to add. During this discussion, […]

Lightning laser breath attack thingy

This week I’ve primarily been working on the boss of our game, Aetherial. The boss of the game is a huge, flying whale, that you as a player is supposed to hunt down. The boss appears multiple times during the game, at first you only see its back as it soars through the clouds, but in the final scene you actually face this leviathan head-on. During this fight the boss will use several attacks against the player, one of which […]

Level design

Before I talk about the actual level design of our game, there are some thing that you may need to know in order to fully get my reasoning.
In our game the player’s lives is represented by bees lined up on the left side of the screen, while the player navigates the “main bee” freely around the screen. The non-controllable bees have the ability to shoot an enemy that gets close enough, but they can also get hit by projectiles and […]

Fourth post: Movement

In my first post I talked about the perspective of our game, Umibōzu, and how we had to change some of our design decisions because of it. One of the mechanics affected by these decisions was the movement system. In this post, I wish to talk a little bit about the movement in our game.
Making a movement system is both very easy and very difficult. It is fairly trivial to make a player avatar move when you press a button, but […]

Dev Blog 4, Level Wrapping

This week I will be writing about how our design goals and ways to achieve those goals impacted the way our levels are implemented.
The camera system in our game is top-down, and the camera controls the pace at which the player progresses. The camera moves upwards on the screen at a set pace. Side to side however, the player is free to move as they wish. The goal with this design is to give a feeling of exploration and freedom, […]

1st of March

Our team member from the Game Design minor finished constructing the overall layout of our level earlier this week. It consisted of large horizontal wall sections, placed in such a way as to create different paths for the player to travel. He then handed it over to me so that I could build the actual level using all of our art assets. It quickly became apparent during the process of placing assets and decorating the level that it’s very beneficial […]

Learning about Sound Design and Feedback

Besides my role as programmer I am also the lead sound designer at our game project aetherial. I felt comfortable picking that role since I did have some experience in music (I played cello for about 10 years) and because I already had some very minor experience in editing and creating sounds digitally. However learning an entire software is no small task and I am still learning new stuff every day about FL Studio, which is the software I chose […]

Letters

Hello and welcome to another one of my blog posts! Today I will write about an art task once more.
This week I have taken some art assets to work on. One of them is the main menu of our game. To be more precise I have been designing the game’s title – Aetherial, and also choosing font and color for main menu words (like “Start the hunt”, “Exit”, etc. – See picture 1)
I have always liked working with letters, or […]

Designing A Difficult Enemy In Aetherial

I Will Blog A Bit About What We Call The Sky-Ray

What was the idea?
The idea behind the Sky-Ray was an interpretation of what we thought was a hard enemy in the concept document. 
And we wanted to create something that would be a bit more difficult than our two enemies that i have mentioned in my previous blog posts. 
We wanted to have a menacing enemy that would really convey a big threat, and what we discussed about […]

Blog Post #4 – Pew pew!

As we near closer to Beta I have been busy filling out the rest of the sounds for Behemoth as new abilities and power-ups are added to the game. During our last play-test, there were some requests for “big” sounds like a huge explosion when you fire your “super mega awesome wave” (name pending) which is a special ability that destroys all enemies on the screen. Since this is such a powerful ability, it should have a powerful sound. For […]

Blog 4

Squids and their movement
So this week I will go back a bit and take a look at how I designed the second enemy in our game, the giant squid. I will as per usual attempt to reflect and reason a bit around the decisions i made while working on the squid.
So for this game revolving around mystery and uncertainty I wanted the an enemy that reflects those feelings. Now, while the Great white I worked on previously is a fitting […]

Parallaxing & Background

When sitting in a car or train and looking at the fence by the road, the poles of the fence passes so quickly, the trees at the side of the road as well. Things further away seems to stay longer and you have more time to look at them.
When creating a 2D game we want to have the illusion of having a 3D space, even though it is not. Having different “layers” of background objects moving at different speed gives […]