Blog 4: Modular branches

In the previous blog entries I have talked about character animations and sprites for different background elements. In this fourth blog entry I will be talking about something a bit more critical for our game Echo.
This weeks feature is branches. Since our setting for the game takes place in a tree, a very important aspect to consider was creating a path for the player. Our team decided that this was to be done using branches. We were to draw some […]

Story scenes

For this week, I have kept on creating scenes for ”Betulla’’ (me and my group will come up with a better name for the game shortly, no worries).  The scenes are supposed to be in the beginning of the game as an introduction together with text and a panoramic animation as a narrative to further spice up the gameplay. What we have thought out to happen in those scenes is shown below on a few sketches made by our game designer:

My […]

Background: The Light Night

Hello, today I’m going to talk about my aesthetic choices when making a background for our game. The environment in our game is depicted as made of stone with some rare trees here and there.
For the atmosphere of the background I inspired myself from the background that is inside the tree right here:

The background I made will be seen because there will be ”cracks/holes” in this inside background. As you can see the mood here is dark but also has that […]

WEEK 3 – SCORE SYSTEM & MORE

WHAT
The third week approached and I was tasked to create the score system for our game, along with some other aspects that come with it. For this I needed to create or utilize:

A script that would keep track of the players score, and add to the score as long as they are not dead.
A HUD (Heads-Up Display) that would communicate the players score.
A pickup that would be generated from killing enemies, which would give score when picked up.
A crosshair that […]

Play testing

This week I am going to talk about play testing.
What it is, why we need play testing and how our team managed to do it.
To start, play testing is to test a game during middle of the project. For us the school has given us specific days for play testing. On that day every group would bring their games (which could be said as demo version or vertical slice of total game) and let other people play. Until now we […]

Game Design 2 – Sound design of the player’s shield bouncing projectiles (Team Leviathan)

 Author : Arnaud Mimoun
  For this week’s blog I’ll talk about the sound design I worked on concerning the sound that the player’s avatar make when they get hit by a projectile and take damage.
For this asset I made a total of 3 sounds :
 

Here is the first sound

Here is the second sound

Here is the third sound

Here is the fourth sound

Here is the fifth sound

Here is the sixth sound

Here is the seventh […]

Achievements and Medals

Author: Hanna Hagenmalm
Team: Leviathan
Concept: Draxl’s Journey
Many games include some sort of score to give the player a sense of progression. Draxl’s Journey is aimed mainly at new, 40+ gamers, and so we decided that the score should be easy to understand and encouraging. Our thinking was that receiving a low score could be discouraging, rather than inspiring, for players who are not yet converted.
The result was a simple system of achievements. Instead of receiving any punishment (other than the failure […]

Eye catching Menu Screens? I’ve heard of those.

Stella from Team Nazgul here!
This blog entry is going up DAYS too late. So sorry about that. I just completely forgot about the entire blog last thursday and have been busy all weekend until now. This won’t happen again, promise!
Anyway, this week I wanted to talk about the main menu background and buttons I designed for Burn Witch, Burn.

Finished design

I begun designing the main menu/start screen last week, but only got as far as some simple […]

Alpha, Play testing. Week 3.

What?
So last week i talked about how important taking notes and documenting are. I would like to continue a little bit on that road. This week we did have an open playtesing of all the games that was beeing created in class. Our game, Brun witch burn, got played by approximately twenty people. With this came a lot of feedback, good and bad. My job was to take notes try to see what people likes and disliked. We only had […]

Putting it all together! #5SD064

Update/fixes from last week
So I reworked the control scheme into a more interactive experience for the player.
Before jumping into the first level the player will first go to my “tutorial”. The player can spend as much time as he/she likes to get familiar with the controls/movements, it’s also not mandatory the player can skip direct into gameplay instead.

From the text Avoid it will spawn obstacles that will fall down, obstacles which the player takes damage from on collision. I also […]

5sd064 Thomas Härdin Designing Level Progression

I am back for another update. This time covering our take on level progression. 

Since our, Fenrir’s game contain multiple levels in form of hacking doorpads as a spy doing industrial espionage we pretty early in development realised that this means we may very well need to create multiple levels. The follow-up concern for me became the fact that we needed a system for progressing after finishing a level, the player of course would want to move to the next area […]

You spin my head

The project for this week was to implement a second power-up. As the first power-up gave the player a giant meteor to incinerate the enemies, the new power-up will be more defensive. When talking about defense a lot of people will probably think of shields, and that is just what i made. A fire shield. When the player activates the power-up a fire shield will spawn around the player and follow them around for a few seconds. Any enemies that […]