Designer of title menu

Hi. It is I, the designer of time is back again to continue with Echo (not final name) and using my ideas to make it more imersive as ever than any game you’ve seen.
This time I want to write about an idea that are not yet implemented in the game.The idea I have designed is our future title menu.
The camera is static and fixed at the moth nest. The player can roam around inside of the screen with the childs, […]

Extreme group dynamics

(Note: comparatively super serious and tasteless)
At my project manager course we have learned much about how group dynamics affect team performance. The gist of it is that everyone needs to be understood as well as represented within the group for them to enjoy their work and thereby produce better results. This is primarily achieved through communication, although the ways of communicating can be vastly different. A usual way to spark conversation is doing team building exercises (hence the name). These […]

Blog 2 – Week 7

Working with the Power Up
For about the past two weeks I have been trying to perfect the power up script. I, like many others, do not know Unity very well so it takes time to learn all the different ways to do achieve the same outcome. A little background before discussing the way I have been able to get the power up to the point it’s at now. For the alpha of our game we wanted to have a power […]

Designing a Main Menu That Fits Your Game

Hello. In this blog post I will talk about creating a menu that connects with your game in terms of it’s visuals and mechanics. If you would like to learn more about this project you can check my previous blog post “An Easier Sprint Overview” where I talk about changes given to a template that we received from our teacher when first introduced to a project methodology called Scrum.
While thinking about how the menu would be like, I thought […]

Moth game: Improving the sonar with procedural mesh generation

This week we had our first playtest. Among the feedback we received, there was this idea of having the sonar bounce or stop when it collided with obstacles. This would make sense, since that’s usually how sonars work in the real world, but also because of how it impacts the gameplay. If the sonar can be used to see through everything, there won’t be as many options for how to build in surprises in a level. Blocking the sonar opens […]

The Moray Eel boss

This past week me and my team have been discussing the possible implementation of a boss in our game (SelFish). As of yet, it’s not final that we will have this boss in our finished product. However, we felt that it is important to include a designed concept with the core mechanics needed before the feature freeze coming up next week. So therefore, I’ve mainly been focusing on this boss this sprint.
The team decided on a moray eel as the […]

Ammo UI (Coding) – Week 2

Last week, i accepted the task of making the ammo UI for our game. While i thought the task would be relatively simple, i was proven wrong when i actually began the work on it. While the task seems simple enough, i also had to go through the code written by my fellow teamates, which required a significant amount of time. That time of course, was spent to understand the code already written and further on used for the aforementioned task. […]

Backgrounds and parallax

During this last week I’ve been mostly working on the background and its related components. At first I had to make a single static image to be panned across the screen as an initial version of the background. This was done to avoid presenting a blank background last week which would have made the game look more unfinished than it was. However, I didn’t make that version without any thought put into it. It was done in photoshop (like all […]

Alpha, Conveying controls #5SD037

 
Game state: Alpha
Today we had our Alpha presentation, it went…Not super good, but acceptable.
There is a lot of things lacking in our game. As a designer I have failed to convey simple mechanic to the player. At least in our alpha version.
We have a crow circling the player. It is an indicator for how long the player can teleport, and it also has a glow to indicate when the players power up is ready. At our alpha demonstration we got […]

Game Development Update #2

Well, hello there!
Welcome back for another peek into the splendid game called Samsara. For all of you out there who just jumped aboard and have no clue what this is all about, please have a look at the previous post called “Game Development Update #1″.
*geee* I’m so excited, Ted! Tell me ASAP what you’ve been up to this week!
Hold your horses, I’ll get right to it! This week I play tested the game and experimented with the overall level design. As of […]

A vicious flower

For this post I choose to focus on the designing and drawing I made this week of one of the enemies for our game. We have decided that besides the usual dangers that lurk in the world of an insect we should also have a flower that can shoot projectiles at our protagonist, and since the programers need to integrate the animation into the game it was time to create it now.
The flower is supposed to be an enemy, so […]

Preparing for the End of the Alpha Phase

This week marked the end of the alpha phase of the project. As a result, I haven’t been focusing on any single design task, but more on designing a level that demonstrates our work on the project so far and I’ve also been helping out with implementing assets.
On Monday there was a playtest session, where every team could show their game and let other teams play them and give feedback. This was really helpful, because it turned out that no one really found […]