Navigating through the darkness

Our game is a very dark one, therefore its important that the player have some means of navigation. In the original concept document, the player was supposed to use some sort of coneshaped sonar fireing strait ahead, but I felt like that might not be engough, at least not for the more open world labyrinth we had in mind. Like for instant, an enemy could sneak up behind you and kill you without you knowing what hit you.
Instead me and […]

16/2 review

During this weeks production i have among other things begun the work process of creating decorative assets for our in game environment, specifically two rudimentary models of underwater plants to spice up the game’s visuals. As of the time of writing my team’s game only has a very rudimentary background which is little more than a few colors mixed together to create a temporary image to set the mood of the game rather than represent what will actually be there. […]

Testing the Teleport

Extending last week’s post, the teleport is being developed further in our 2D shoot ’em up game.
First, the implementation of the teleport was fixed. Unity’s rotation axes don’t use the Cartesian Axes reference point, but starts on the positive y axis instead. The teleport now uses basic trigonometry to calculate the radius from the player and confines it to the maximum radius, set in the inspector.
We had also begun playtesting the teleport. The lack of any indication of the maximum […]

Visualizing player health without a HUD

In this weeks blog I would like to write about the task of trying to present the health of the players health without using a HUD.

Realize you don’t want a HUD
Brainstorm ideas on how to make something visible without it
???
Profit

The original plan for our project was to make a bullet hell-esque game. Because of this we felt that it would be necessary to show the amount of available lives  directly on the players avatar to not divert the players focus.
Since the […]

The Art Of Creating Satisfying Feedback!

At the start of the project we decide that one of are main focus was to create a satisfying game play when you use your weapons to shoot your enemies. To achieve this i started to dig in to the deeps of  the internet to later find anything that could help me to learn and understand the art of creating feedback. On my time digging something caught my eye. A video from the Nordic game confreres  2012 Juice it or lose […]

Week 2: The Basic Enemy

For one of our enemies we wanted to start with having a simple behavior that would only move in one direction. The enemy would be moving from right to left and be randomly spawned in on a vertical line slightly outside the main view of the game.
As this would mostly be for learning and having an enemy that wouldn’t do much more than moving straight we decided that having it spawn in endlessly would be a good first step.
The enemy […]

Puzzles

Basing off what I said in my previous blogpost, not having the player spamming a projectile to see has given us a breath of fresh air to the project. We now have a plan for what we want the game to be, which in turn has led to a lot of great design discussions with positive outcomes.
Our gameplay design has now turned into one where the player is traversing a large environment, which is divided into rooms. The rooms are […]

Making of The Main Theme Soundtrack

I’ve always liked to compose soundtracks for games. Since I experienced the beautiful soundtrack of Yoshi’s Island, the idea of me being the next Koji Kondo or Yoko Shimomura has enticed me! I’d like to talk more about what happened from my first experience with a good OST to now, but I’ll skip it so I don’t bore my viewers.
A great opportunity to test what I can do approached me when a lead sound designer was requested for my team. I quickly […]

Game Design 2 – Sound design of the Net-bouncing (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 projectiles of the game make when they bounce on the net/border of the screen.
For this asset I made a total of 4 sounds :
 

Here is the first sound

Here is the second sound

Here is the third sound

Here is the last sound

 
 I as Producer, Project Manager and Sound Designer of our game was charged […]

Blog 16-02-2017 Daniel Ahlberg Game Design 2

What i have been doing and testing the levels for the alpha build.
The first thing i did was to divide the level into three parts, where each part introduces the new enemies for the player. There are three enemies that we are going to use in level, all introduced through three parts. This way the player can see the new enemies and get an idea of their behaviors and how they react and work together with other enemies. All of […]

Tears are made of camera zoom

The size of the camera can be used to set the mood for the player. Look at this picture:
Guy in space
And then this picture:
Lonely guy in space. Don’t you feel bad for him?
Note the emotional impact! Now that you understand the great value of controlling camera zoom, let’s talk about how I implemented it in our game.
We want our level designers to have the tools to control camera zoom for different areas, like in the image below.
A zoomed-out area and […]

Further Development of the Spider Animation

This week I continued to work on the spider animations frames. I did finish the walking animations of the spider, as well as finish the attack animation. The spider walking animation itself took around 28 hours of work time during the week prior to this one. I have already mentioned this in the blog “The Frustrating Spider Animation” in terms of why the process was so long. In short, I didn’t know how the legs of the spider moved in […]