A breeze of fresh air

This week, as opposed to last week, I’ve been doing quite a lot of work.
I started the week with doing some small things to make the environment look less sterile. A sterile and empty environment is something that really affects the feel of a game. Sometimes, if you do it on purpose, like in Mirrors edge for example it can work really well, making the game world feel like a fantasy, a dream, something perfect. But if your game world […]

A breeze of fresh air

This week, as opposed to last week, I’ve been doing quite a lot of work.
I started the week with doing some small things to make the environment look less empty. An empty environment is something that really affects the feel of a game. Sometimes, if you do it on purpose, like in Mirrors edge for example it can work really well, making the game world feel like a fantasy, a dream, something perfect. But if your game world is empty […]

BETA Approaching

This is the last week before BETA.
So, here we are trying to finish up as much as possible before the game is to be put forth for play testing this Monday and later the big BETA presentation next Friday. During this kind of hectic time you sometimes find yourself in need of the answers to the questions you probably should have asked about a week ago when you had two weeks to think it over.
One of these questions is as […]

BETA Approaching

This is the last week before BETA.
So, here we are trying to finish up as much as possible before the game is to be put forth for play testing this Monday and later the big BETA presentation next Friday. During this kind of hectic time you sometimes find yourself in need of the answers to the questions you probably should have asked about a week ago when you had two weeks to think it over.
One of these questions is as […]

Sprites again?

If you’ve been following this blog, you will know a fair bit about the sprites I’ve been making. Last week I talked about the level two sprite. The logical progression is that today I will be talking about the level three sprite, which I will.
The level three sprite was a mixed bag of obstacles. The weapon she would be using had no clear concept at all, the only thing that was set in stone was that it was supposed to […]

Leakin’ dem bytes

Memory leaks are something that programmers (especially those in C and C++) always have to keep in mind. Unfortunately, we didn’t really think about them until roughly halfway into the project. That means we end up with something like this:

Taken from our pre-alpha playtesting build.

This could have ended up a lot worse than it actually did. We didn’t really have any constant leaks, so the total leaks didn’t grow in size.
Now, for those of you that aren’t that into programming, […]

Terminal: Fly City

After the Alpha we felt that we really wanted to have a main menu for the Beta presentation and moved it up on our priority list. I started right away with doing some really fast sketches, trying to explore different ideas and layouts. Some ideas that we had did not fit the game we are creating, for instance, we had an idea of the interrogation room where the game starts, with a flickering lamp. This put on paper looked […]

Haunted Light – Button class

This time I’ll be talking about a simple Button-class that I created this weak and the planning involved around it.
When I was thinking this through and listing everything I needed for the class to do what we want it to do, I planned it to be unnecessarily complicated. How I planned it was that it would be very similar to SFML’s own Sprite class. By creating 4 points, or verticies, they dictate the buttons size and then we could […]

Week 7 – With Intent

There isn’t much I can write about this week, since I got a sudden call this Tuesday. I’ll be taking the ferry back to the mainland tomorrow afternoon, I’ll earn some money from it and the traveling expenses is being paid, I couldn’t really pass up on that now could I?
During the last weekend and into Monday, I’ve been working on the Collision Manager, Unlike the first version of the collision manager that took 2 arguments (position and radius), the […]

University Projects: Level 1 Design

Hello everyone!

This week, I’ve been working on finalizing the first level in our game. This was interesting because I got to work from the ground up, starting out with the basic design, getting started on environmental design, finishing it, designing the puzzles intended for the map and then finishing the details of it all.
So Level 1s design is based around a library. The reason for using a library was both that it was easy to design multiple encounters all in […]

Game configurations

Today I am going to talk about game configurations and how they were implemented in the project. A configuration file is just a ordinary text file with game information that is loaded into the game. But I am not doing this the ordinary way, I am using something much better.We start of this post by asking ourselves a question.
Why do we need configurations?Every game needs some sort of configuration to make it easier to change things on demand and making it […]

Animations and life

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. – Oscar Wilde

What is life without motion? What is motion without joy? What is joy without soul?
In the beginning of development to our game (http://lindermeister.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/week-2-of-game-development/) we didn’t lay so much emphasize on animation. Me personally thought that as it was a top down shooter, animation would come in fourth place as it isn’t very detailed animations you can do. We don’t have those […]