A* Pathfinding

Today I am going to talk about path finding, more specifically A* path finding which is just one of many methods of doing path finding.

What is path finding?
Essentially, path finding is a technique for finding a way trough a bunch of obstacles from point A to point B.
In general you apply path finding with AI, but there are other cases that path finding is used as well.

What is A*?
A* is a heuristic graph based algorithm.
A grid of nodes is used to […]

Animations, Level Design and Credits Menu!

This week, in contrast to last week, I’ve mostly been doing some practical work. One of the tasks of the week has been to improve upon the animations we’ve been using so far in the proejct.
Simon Fredell did the original, few, frames while I have been improving on his work, turning 4 frames into 7, 8 into 15, etc, manually tweening between each frame.
Below is two images to illustrate what I’ve been doing.
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Tweening, or inbetweening […]

Game Dev Feb. Texture makin

Hello guys
This week I’ve been focusing on making a tile that can be used as a ground layer on any level of the game. The idea with the tile is to make it connect with itself in any direction.

The making of the Stone tile works like you create a few lesser pebbles with reasonable detailed, for this tile I aimed to create something in our aimed art style. One thing that could be done to the existing picture is […]

Project “Haunted Light” 2014-02-27 Stone Walls

It’s Thursday and yet another blog post! Project “Haunted Light” (former name “Bloody Badgers”) is still going strong and we in group 5 are getting ready for our next milestone, which is the BETA version of the game. One completed artifact of my many other started ones I had for this week’s sprint is the stone wall tile set, which I will talk about on this post. Jonna, our group’s very talented lead artist, is the one behind the game’s […]

So, another week and another handful of random props to be made.
I am once again faced with the fact that I have not really made anything all that exciting this week, even less exciting than last week I would say. For Last week I at least had a sofa this week it was really small stuff, but the biggest piece I think was the chair so I am going with that.
So, how to make a chair.
First look at chairs, 40’s-50’s […]

So, another week and another handful of random props to be made.
I am once again faced with the fact that I have not really made anything all that exciting this week, even less exciting than last week I would say. For Last week I at least had a sofa this week it was really small stuff, but the biggest piece I think was the chair so I am going with that.
So, how to make a chair.
First look at chairs, 40’s-50’s […]

Third Artifact: Pathfinding and Grid building

This week I will talk a bit about our pathfinding. (Warning: Confusing)

There are a couple of different pathfinding algorithms out there, on the internet. There are Breath-first, Best-first, Dijkstra, A*(A-star), etc. Almost everyone, on different forums, suggest A* as pathfinding algorithm for most games. It is reasonable fast in most instances, even though some of the others were quicker in some scenarios.
A*, like most other algorithms, needs a tile based system to search through.
Each Tile, or Cell, is given […]

Curvy trails of motion; using Beziers to smooth things out

So… I like OpenGL…. and trianglestrips… so this will be yet another post about something made using just that: namely ”motion trails”!
For those unfamiliar with the term, trails (they probably go by different names too), are essentially what makes up the ”blades” in games like Fruit Ninja:

 
Too make this, I followed basically the same steps as I did when creating the walls (see last blog post). I start by, every few frames (initially I set it to once every […]

Wear-down effect on truck!

Hey there reader(s), here comes my weekly post. Last week I didn’t manage to get everything done, I had a drawing of the truck to do. It was meant to be used for the picture that you see of the truck when you upgrade in the costumization menu. I’m still not quite done with it yet, but I have been working on other things this week instead. The truck is about halfway done at this point, besides there are a […]

Week 6 – With Intent

This week Have been pretty harsh, the Light Engine ”Let There Be Light” is obviously not optimised for OpenGL properly, so put out more than 2 update-able lights and you get some serious bugs on OS X.
I see no way around this unless I reconfigure the whole LTBL library, which I don’t really have time for right now. For testing Purposes with less lights I can still test the code on Mac with the Prototype, for the full game […]

Being shot

This week I have, among many other things, worked on an animation of the main character being shot. It turned out to be a rather tricky thing, I tried to imagine how the body would react if being hit by a bullet and tried to sketch it really fast. I experimented with movement in her arms, making them go up in front of her body but it did not look good at all and I soon realized that I should […]

Better colliders. Artifact 3

I repaired the CollisionManager. It was broke. I dont want to talk about it.
From yesterday though:
When the player fish and an enemy collides, two things will happen in this game right now:
1. The player receives experience points. These are what will make the Player grow and level up though out the game.
2. The enemy will be eaten. In other words both the enemy collider and the enemy object, carrying a sprite and some functions get deleted.
(Enemy object are not discussed in […]