YOU DIED- 5SD064 HANNA AHO LIND

This sprint I was tasked with making a “death” or “losing” sprite of our submarine, for when it has been hunted down by the giant fish. I decided to go for three different aproaches but with the same teqnicues. I choosed the same brushes and decided to go with a theme of red- to symbolise and communicate danger.
It boiled down to these three concepts, one where I black out all the colour of the submarine and replace the blue light, […]

Adding Animations

This week most of my time was spent on adding animations to the different enemy types as well as the Behemoth Cannon to give the game more life and to also give some visual feedback to the player when he does certain actions or when certain things happen on screen.


In order to add an animation, I first get a sprite sheet from my artists that has each frame of that animation in an equally sized cell, I then […]

The Animation of Barry the Sqrrl

Have you ever wondered how cartoon characters seem to be alive? Well, of course you have and I am pretty sure you know how animators made it happen, but in case you don’t know how animators “give life” to your favorite characters, for example in 2D animation, they literally draw objects and characters on paper or in the computer and then position them in frames to create the animation.
There’s different kinds of animations like 2D or 3D, and different ways […]

Insight #4 – Lasers & Animation

As explained in Insight #2 – Iteration, in our adaptation of the Behemoth game concept we decided on a military sci-fi setting with dystopian and cyberpunk elements through an arcade art style. Having this as our aesthetic cornerstone, we gravitated towards energy fields and lasers when we designed the visual representation of the ship’s dynamic elements; for example, we replaced the original explosive cannonball-like projectile with a powerful energy burst akin to that of an ‘energy attack’ as seen in […]

The Mist of Umibozu

One of the defining visual features of Umibozu is the mist, so it was important to discover a way to create a visually compelling asset that would surround the player for majority of the gameplay.
Throughout the development of Umibozu, I have returned to the subject of animating the mist with unsatisfying results a couple of times up until this week.
There were a few requirements I set for the mist design before producing it:

Concealment: The mist acts as a layer of concealment […]

Blog 4: Parallallallax

Hi!
In this entry I will write about the development of the background for our game Beelonging.
In our game you control a swarm of bees flying back to save the beehive from a hungry bear. It takes place in a forrest, so for our background we wanted to include trees, stones, bushes etc. Since our game is a side scroller, we wanted to have a parallax background, which means that you divide the background into several layers (background, player, foreground) and make them […]

Is it better to stay in the background at times?

As I was trying to come up with a topic for this weeks blog post I was thinking of situations in which the team would meet up to work. I try to make this a common practice within our team. For the most part I am always the one who schedules the work times and I also make sure that we have someplace to work, yet once we are there, I don’t really do anything special. We usually host the […]

Blog Post 4 – Level design

Level design is one of the things many people greatly underestimate. Great level design often goes under the radar since most of the time you don’t notice when its good, you only notice when its bad. Creating a level that would do our game justice was my main focus this week.
We are creating a game from the umibozu concept document and our game has a big focus on exploration. When exploration is a big part of the game, the level […]

Missing minor in digital audio design

Developing a digital game in a group of five game design students in four minors – game design, programming, graphics, and project manager, some may note that one minor is necessarily missing. In a cross-functional small team developing a game, optimally anyone can take a part as a sound designer, and contribute to the project in a best way as he or she can, although quality may vary, based on previous experience, skills, musical nature and nurture. Some student groups […]

Simple AI

Today, I am going to be talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its most simple terms. AI is the intelligence that is placed on Non-Player Characters or NPC’s. NPC’s for example, are the enemies or villagers within a game. As a programmer that is relatively new to Game programming it can be hard to implement… Continue reading Simple AI

Add a new enemy type: shooting enemy

Before the beta playtesting, I was working on adding a new enemy which can shoot at the player in our game. Before that, there were only two kinds of enemies in our game: glaucus and pufferfish, and they all behaved in a similar way. In the game they will only move to the player, not firing projectiles, which is a bit boring in a shoot’em up game.
Then our group decided to add a new enemy to our game: Sky ray. […]

Jellyfish on the Move

This week I would like to talk about the design and animation process of our second enemy, the jellyfish.
The enemy jellyfish has normal movement speed, low damage and has melee attack. It also latches onto the player avatar and slows it. I liked the idea of a jellyfish gliding in the sky because of its natural movement pattern. And thought the leg and tentacle movement would look aesthetic.
I started the design process by looking up several jellyfish types, and came […]