Boss design

This week I will be writing about the design of the boss in our game and how we can make a large boss that moves in an interesting way while still being easy to draw.
We wanted the boss to be huge, to stay true to the game concept. But trying to make the boss as one big sprite would make it tedious for the artists to draw and animate. That’s when i got some inspiration from one of the bosses of […]

Blog 4: Making a boss fight with a feeling

Now that we are nearing the last weeks of the project means that we are on the final parts of our games and in our case the only thing left, except for balancing and testing that is, is our boss fight. In our game we chose to have the boss being sort of attack-able, a change we thought would be a bit better since in the original concept the player can only run and dodge. At first we had planned […]

Week #4 – Cross-border Management

This week I have had the misfortune of having to leave Gotland and head to London on personal business for a number of days. The timing could have been better, to put it mildly. We are currently in the final sprint before the Beta milestone, an important week for the entire group. Leading up to my departure I have been worried that losing the Producer in this stage of the project is quite risky for the team’s communication, and thus […]

Level Design

Recently I have been working on level design. The idea we have behind building a level with everything in a predetermined place, is to make sure we can engineer the experience the player will receive from our game. We want the player to find the game mysterious, feel like they are looking for something unnatural and scary. The way we can do that is to scale down the challenge in terms of enemies. If we have enemies there, we can […]

Design Feedback – 4

You are describing well your thought-process behind the music for the game. It amazes me how accurate and detailed your decisions were behind all of this. In a very clear manner you describe the background to your game and how other cultural influences your music for your boss level. I’ve listened to the track multiple times and I can really get the feel for the Umibozu aesthetic. It is very spooky and it adds something extra when playing a mysterious […]

Animations, Sprites and my consequent thoughts thereon

So, for the last couple of weeks I have been making sprites – mostly. I am not particularly good at – and I do not particularly enjoy, making animations. Nonetheless, it’s a task that needs to be done, and I am one of two people who is doing it. Well, I was – until our second artist suddenly quit the course last week, leaving me with some more sprites to finished than I bargained for. It’s fine though, I’m lucky […]

4. More sounds

This week I worked with some sounds for our game. In the beginning of this week I borrowed a disk from Finn with a lot of non-copyright sounds on it. It have helped me very much since there are sounds that i can’t produce myself and the internet could not provide me with good quality sounds like this. I worked specifically with the sounds for one of our enemies together with the sounds for the playable character.
The sounds I needed […]

Squishy Squashi Squids

 

For our enemy our first thought was squids because or art style is steam punk and you see a lot of squids or octopus in steam punk style.
I and so many other graphics students at Game Design are new to animation. We have not had any other assignments than doing bouncy balls so stretch and squash was not that new to us.
There were a lot of struggles in trying to get it right and understanding how animation works. Squash and […]

Cheeky Checkpoints

This week I’ll be talking about the cause of my headache last week and the waste of many hours, checkpoints. They’re not entirely the cause though, it’s more because of stubbornness, tunnel vision and probably some idiocy.
Where the problems started
In our game you’re progressing through a level left to right, and as the level is a little lengthy we want checkpoints so the player doesn’t have to redo all of it. This was to be my main task for last […]

Blog Post #4 Background music

!Link to sound clip at the end!
Welcome back once again to my blog, today I will tell you about my design process with the background music as the lead sound designer of team Cockatrice.
Take a moment and picture yourself in this situation. You are out at sea on a chilly night, it’s hard to anything and it’s critical that you are able to navigate through these waters to get home. The wind is in your face, you’re shivering from the […]

Boaty intelligence

The ocean is dangerous – it’s easy to get lost in the mist and monsters lurk under the surface. Well, they’re supposed to. They need AI in order to bring life to the game and immersiveness to the player. The AI defines how the creatures behave and how they can interact with the player. There are unlimited ways to do this, but all of them might not be boaty enough. Let’s get the boaty intelligence working.
Bringing sprites to life
The squid gang. […]

May Ahab a Moment of Your Time?: Designing the Leviathan (and Friends)

I do not view myself as someone who thinks outside the box. Instead, I prefer to believe I bring a shovel before I go inside. By working within the confines of what is given to me, I feel I am more creative than if I was without constraint. It is this mentality I adopted as always when I began working with “Aetherial.” (Disclaimer: The following work is representative of an ongoing process and subject to change)
Brainstorming
In the beginning of development […]