Enemy Waves Spawner

I’m going to talk something about how I created an enemy waves spawner. Before this, there were only two types of enemies come out from the left screen in our game, and the enemies just keep doing this forever. In a traditional “shoot ’em’ up” game, enemies always come out with different waves, for example, there is only one enemy in the first wave, then two enemies in the second wave, then maybe five enemies, and so on.
In order to […]

Level generator

For the level pattern in unity 2D games,  i could generate all enemies before hand the moment the game started. However it requires lots of memory and becomes really hard to manage, even slows down your game if the level is too long. So we should generate each GameObject dynamically, it becomes easy to manage and change.
There are plenty of tutorials online of how to design a powerful level generator with all-rounded functions. What i did in the Aetherial project […]

Insight #2 – Iteration

In this entry I will present the iterative process behind the creation of the Behemoth’s cannon and the changes that it went through from its conceptualization until its current alpha-ready state.
The concept of Behemoth called for a disproportionately large cannon as one of the cornerstones of its aesthetic. With this in mind, we decided on a military sci-fi setting with dystopian and cyberpunk elements, which resulted in a simple yet rugged and powerful design. Our main inspiration came from SNES […]

Sprint 4 – Polishing the harbor and player boat.

This week I have been tasked with polishing the habor for the starting page. Basically the idea behind it is that the harbor is the background for the main menu but also the starting location. Once the player hits play, he has control over the boat, gets indications on the controls and try the controls in the harbor before sailing away and starting his journey.
To the harbor I have added a city with vendors on the bottom so that it […]

Blog 2: Designing the enemies in Umibozu

After picking the concept for Umibozu, the game where the player travels through the fog until they encounter the mysterious entity known as Umibozu which I mentioned in the last blog, we chose to stick mostly to the concept that was chosen. That meant that we wanted to avoid any major changes in the mechanics, level layout and enemies, but there are some things that can’t be left alone and one of those were the enemies.

When designing the enemies we […]

Game Design 2: Blogpost #2, Enemy AI

For this blog I will be writing about the different AI in our game Behemoth. I am Jonathan Berggren the lead (and only) programmer of Group Siren.
In the concept document for the Behemoth game three types of enemies are described, we decided to use the exact same enemy types, although changing the way they look to fit the different artstyle we decided to have for the game. These enemies are:

The Shooter
The Kamikaze
The Spawner (that we chose to call The Carrier […]

Boss bear – About the boss fight and the design of the bears appearance.

In the game that we are making, the bees are rushing to their hive to save it from a bear that is attacking it. Completing the first level lets you play the boss fight with the bear. One of my tasks in developing the game is to design the looks of the bear and animate it.
The result: what the boss fight looks like in the game
The mechanics of the boss fight is that the bear open and closes its mouth, […]

Cannot Kill the Battery!

This week I’ve been working on a “battery”-mechanic for our group’s (Bugbear!) game “Umibōzu”. Until now, the player has been able to use the floodlights at will, which unbalances the game by making it possible to “spam” the floodlight, rendering powerups and other mechanics trivial. This is also a problem because it contradicts our aesthetic goal of “mystery”. To rectify, we decided that it is time to implement a “battery”-mechanic which shows a meter or similar, giving visual feedback, so […]

Blog Post 2 – Movement

Hello! Time for another blog post. In this post I will talk about player movement in our game. The player controls the movement with the WASD buttons. W and S are for thrust, D and A are for rotation. The player is a boat and the player can traverse the level any direction. These are the two most important things when it comes to the player movement in our game. The problem that I currently have is that the movement […]

You may kiss the bride

This game was created by Team Hastur for the Shoot ‘em’ Up course at Uppsala University (2018).
Side note: There’s currently an issue with the opening cutscene not loading in the WebGL build. Because of this the game will just be black for a while after pressing start. I plan on fixing this as soon as I have the time. I will also be providing a download link as soon as I have decided on a hosting option.

2. Enemies from the deep sea

In this blog post, I’ll talk about the design and reasoning for the enemies in our game, Depth and why they replaced and differs from the ones found in the original concept.

First of all, in the original concept document for Depth, it was mentioned that the game had three enemies with the creative names of ”The Fish, The Other Fish and The Other Other Fish” and within this box you could see a fish (eel?), a fish with tentacles and […]

Animating the Squid

In reality, cephalopod attacks on humans or boats are rare, but for the purposes of Umibozu, a squid was one of the enemies in its original concept document. In our interpretation, the squid became an enemy that was would be distinguished as a slower moving type of enemy in the game. This had to be taken into consideration when creating the animation for the squid.
There were two types of animation cycles required for the squid to be implemented into the […]