DynaMine: The Beginning.

Hello, and welcome to the start of a new set of blog posts.
These following posts over the coming weeks will document our entire group’s work process for our arcade park game ‘DynaMine’.
For this section of the course we have been given the task to create a theme park game with an unconventional input device that we are to create/build ourselves. For this section of the there weren’t as strict guidelines for production. However, we knew as a group that we wanted […]

Big Game Project Post 2

With my role in this project being the lead animator it isn’t all that surprising that most of my time has been spent with our main character and the many animations he needs for the finished game. Much of that time was spent trying to work out the various little difficulties that tends to arise when someone deals with software one is not an expert with. Seeing as our game is made with 3d assets we and mostly i get […]

WEEK 6 – THE COMEBACK

WHAT
This week I was primarily tasked with continuing to create sounds for the game, while also refining some of the sounds we already had. The tasks I was given were:

Create a sound for when the character is damaged in the game.
Create a sound for each enemy when they are damaged by the player.
Create a sound for when you are firing the laser gun.
Create a sound for when you are firing the nerf gun.
Create UI sounds, such as when traversing the […]

Random stuff: white boxes and Black Mirror

So, this is my first blog post outside of any specific assignment. In order to practise my writing, I will simply spew out some nonsense about the stuff that has been on my mind lately.
 
Whiteboxing

Recently, my first team finished our first real project. It didn’t turn out as well as I wanted it to be, but I learned a lot of things. One of those things was the realisation that whiteboxing isn’t something that comes naturally to everyone.
What is whiteboxing? […]

Game Production Afterthoughts

It’s over. Our ten-week march is over and we have a game. Or, at least, something that constitutes as a game? I am being super harsh here. Do we have a game with a start and an end? Yes. Can you finish the game? You could if you are very good from the start. So, ok, we have a game. Could it have been better? By a lot. Yay! We have a bit undercooked game. Not bad for a bunch […]

5sd064 Turning the power-ups into pickup-able items

Hello again, Thomas Härdin here turning back to the power-ups of our game. As I’ve written about before I had to decide on the functionality of this games power-ups which turned out to be some fairly easily manageable enhancements to the players projectiles when playing in the hacking mode. We did get three of them, a rapid fire function that activates when 8 enemies are killed, a wider shot that you get through pressing a button, same as the wide […]

Boss Design and Implementation

Design
Because I only worked on fixing bugs this week, I decided to write about some design and coding work I had done the week before which is a lot more interesting to write about. Namely how me and our lead designer worked on the design of the boss and how I implemented it in the game.
When we designed the boss we had the following goals for it:

The boss needs to test the player’s understanding of the core mechanics of the […]

Vertex Colors

Vertex colors. It’s color data stored at vertices and you can do some pretty cool stuff with them. Most of the time you won’t have any need for vertex colors, and in unity the only shaders that make use of them are sprites, but when you’re making your own shaders you can do some pretty nifty things. Vertex colors can be used as a cheap way to shade or color meshes by combining the color with the diffuse, but a much […]

#5 “Sorry guys i need to do my homework” – Planing parallel projects.

Hi everyone!
Today i want to talk about the backlog and parallel projects.
It is common to encounter problems while working with two projects at once. At the moment we tend to structure our work so that it clashes with our ordinary school work. Handling scheduling gets difficult and our insight into our teammates situations regarding time spent on lectures, homework and other school-related activities tend to be vague at best. Many blame the schools scheduling and lack of communication for the […]

Polish and additional fixes

This week has been focused on polish. Especially when it comes to the levels and animations.
I have done some fixes to the animation, some final touches so that everything looks good for the final release.
There were some hiccups when it comes to the animations. For example, Marbles started to flap and move her legs when we put her animations into the game, the troubleshooting was a long and was a bit tedious, but when we found the problem then the […]

Moth game: Clues

What now?
Most of the mechanics in our game are finished, and we’re getting close to the final deadline. What’s left is polishing the experience of the mechanics, so that the player knows what to do and can feel a sense of progression. One particularily confusing situation players would face in our game was encountering breakable and openable branches. This was clear during beta playtesting, where we would see players bump into the branches, not aware of how to break through. […]

Playtest and Polish

Hello and welcome to this week’s blog post!
This week started out with the alpha presentation which went really well I believe, we kept it fairly short and sweet and did not recieve many questions at all which I would assume means that people understood what we are doing with the game. I saw it as a positive and I hope it was a positive! We got some feedback on the obstacles we had which we will take into consideration and […]